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Kingston Wm. Heath

The Howland Mill Village: A Missing Chapter in Model Workers’ Housing

Between the rigid social and visual order of early factory workers’ housing and

the large-scale speculation that later created the triple-decker, a generation of

capitalists and planners envisioned a less paternalistic scheme that melded the

garden suburb and the mill. New Bedford’s Howland Mill Village put in

place a di@rent relationship between capital and labor-and, had its parent

corporation survived thefinancial crisis of the 189Os, might well have set workers’

housing on a radically dt$zrent course.

ew Bedford, Massa-

N chusetts-like her

sister textile commu-

nities of Lowell,

Fall River, and

Lawrence-is a city of three-decker flats.

Here, long street vistas of wooden multi-

family housing are linked visually and con-

ceptually to the powerful presence of a red

brick mill that characteristically terminates

the block (fig. 1). During the second and

most productive phase of New Bedford’s

textile era (from about 1901 to 1925), the

three-decker became the most common

form of urban housing for the largely

unskilled labor force of the textile indus-

try. By 1930, two- and three-deckers com-

prised 41.3 percent of New Bedford’s

housing stock; 64.2 percent of the city’s

population lived in dwellings designed for

two or more families.’

While this physical relationship of a

textile mill flanked by rows of multifamily

housing made New Bedford a “typical”

New England industrial landscape in the

first quarter of the twentieth century, there

was a brief moment when industrial and

community planning in the region could

have been set on a very different course.

Between 1888 and 1899, the short-lived

Howland Mill Corporation offered its

workers the option of either renting at rea-

sonable rates architect-designed model

housing (fig. 2) or purchasing building sites

through a cooperative ownership housing

arrangement. The single-family workers’

Fig. 1. These three-derkers line North Front Street, which ends at thrformcr Nashawena Mill B on Bcllwille

Avenue in New Bedford’s North End. Photograph 1995 by Kingston Heath.

Fig. 2. The Howland Mill Village, 1996. The three workers’ cottage designs are all vi&/e at leff. The contour plan,

the irrqularplacemmt of the cottages, the wide streets with granite curbs, and the trees liniq the sidcwark are all

origirral designjeatures. Photograph by King.vton He&.

Old-Time New England 1997 Page 6.5

housing was augmented by a curvilinear

suburban plan, while additional “breathing

places” were provided by generously pro-

portioned, tree-lined streets. Space was also

set aside for a proposed communal park

that, had it been created, would have been

part of a continuous chain of city parks and

scenic parkways. These naturalistic plan-

ning elements were to provide the setting

for an envisioned eight-mill, state-of-the-

art, spinning mill complex connected to a

transportation network of new macadam

roads and an electric rail system.

In their desire to link technology and

nature, as the earlier industrial planners of

Lowell had sought to do, Howland Mill

organizer William D. Howland and the

newly established Boston architectural firm

ofWheelwright and Haven provided their

own progressive vision for an urban indus-

trial utopia. Their creative synthesis of en-

lightened social policies, modern

technological processes, and the pastoral

ideal of the garden suburb tradition resulted

in what was probably the first picturesque

workers’ housing designed and built as part

of an industrial master plan in the United

States. At the very least, the Howland Mill

Village was among a select number of late

nineteenth-century experiments that influ-

enced the renewal of progressive company

housing and naturalistic industrial planning

in the first quarter of the twentieth cen-

tury. Further, the plan for the village dif-

fered critically from the paternalistic visions

put forth earlier in New England, and in

this regard the story of the village provides

essential specifics for understanding the

broader picture ofworkers’ housing in the

region. Its evolution traces not only the

transition from company-built to specula-

tor-built housing that ultimately brought

the three-decker to New Bedford but also

chronicles how ideas about laborers’ hous-

ing had changed as the nineteenth century

came to an end.

THE HOWLANDS IN NEW BEDFORD

William Dillwyn Howland (fig. 3) was born

in New Bedford on March 27, 1853. The

son of Matthew and Rachel Howland, he

was part of a prominent Quaker family

who, with a handful of other elite in the

city, controlled the whaling industry, the

emerging textile industry, banking, and,

very often, local government. His grand-

father, George Howland, was among New

Bedford’s earliest whaling merchants and

the first president of the New Bedford

Commercial Bank (later the National Bank

ofCommerce). His father Matthew (1814

84) and uncle George (mayor of New

Bedford from 1857 to 1860) continued the

family’s involvement in the whaling indus-

try until uninsured losses of its Arctic whal-

ing fleet in 1871 and 1876 compelled them

to begin selling their remaining ships in

1881.* In addition, Howland was a close

business associate of William Wallace

Crapo, president of New Bedford’s first

textile concern, the Wamsutta Mills (1846),

and a director of its second, the Potomska

Mills (1871) and ofWilliam J. Retch and

his son Morgan, both one-time mayors of

the city. William J. Retch also served on

the board of directors of Wamsutta and

Potomska mills in 1889.

That a small group of people held

unusual control over New Bedford’s

wealth and how it was allocated helps to

Page 66 1997 Old-Time New England

planning, in the modem sense of

the term, was often the end result

of private business development.4

Fig. 3. William D. Howland in his senior year at Brown

Universify,from Catalogue of the Offkers and Students of

Brown University (1873-74). CourtesyJohn Hay Library,

Little direct documentary

evidence establishes Howland’s

specific role in the design of his

mills and mill village,5 but enough

is known about his background to

suggest why he in particular would

implement a progressive worker

housing plan where and when he

did. Howland’s parents were life-

long leaders in the Society of

Friends long after many prosperous

New Bedford Quakers had become

Unitarians or Congregationalists;

his father served as an elder and a

clerk of the New Bedford Monthly

Meeting for approximately thirty

years. The family was particularly

active in philanthropic work. In

1870, Matthew Howland donated

Brown University.

explain how Howland could achieve his de-

tailed urban plan with such mechanistic ef-

ficiency? Within an otherwise conservative

business atmosphere, Howland was able to

carry out his progressive ideas in large part

because he could rely on a close network

of influential associates for support. The

complex plan for his mills and workers’

village-involving a wide range of planning

issues from parks to trolley lines, from

water and sanitation systems to progressive

housing and modem thoroughfares-was

able to proceed as a coordinated effort be-

tween business and government with rela-

tively little bureaucratic intervention. Until

municipal agencies appeared in New

Bedford and other cities toward the end of

the nineteenth century, urban-industrial

for public use an interdenominational

chapel to serve the workers in the indus-

trial North End where the Wamsutta Mills

had been established in 1846. Such gestures

of social concern cast an eye towards busi-

ness and civic interests by attempting to

create a layer of moral supervision in

workers’ living areas, but they also sug-

gested a peculiar brand of enlightened, ethi-

cal capitalism.

Howland’s grandmother and mother

also played significant roles in the public

sphere. His gt;mdmother, Susan (Howland)

Howland, had been a staunch antebellum

supporter of abolition, prison reform, and

education and aid to the Indians, as well as

a proponent of the more equitable distri-

bution of property His mother, Rachel

Old-Time New England 1997 Page 67

Collins Smith (1816-1902), was born into

a leading Quaker family in Philadelphia and

was a minister at Friends meetings for fifty-

five years. Like many influential women in

her day, she was active in such philanthro-

pies as the City Mission, the Association

for the Relief of Aged Women, and the

Children’s Aid Society.6 But, unlike other

prominent women in New Bedford, her

social convictions extended to labor issues

as well. In 1867, Rachel Howland served

as a mediator when English skilled work-

ers at Wamsutta Mills struck for a ten-hour

work day, and she was instrumental in

reaching a peaceful settlement.’ According

to a family relation, she viewed the well-

known English social reformer Robert

Owen as a hero for having bought up, with

his partners, the spinning mills of New

Lanark in Scotland and turning them into

a model factory. This famous social experi-

ment introduced modem machinery, rea-

sonable working hours, good wages,

healthy living accommodations, and a

school near the factoiy8

William D. Howland had not only the

predisposition to investigate enlightened

attitudes toward industrial labor but the

business training and opportunity to do so

as well. Even though his father’s whaling

fleet was largely destroyed in the Arctic dur-

ing the 187Os, when Howland had entered

the business after his graduation from

Brown University, he was able to turn his

professional ambitions to New Bedford’s

burgeoning textile industry as, initially, a

clerk at Wamsutta Mills by the end of that

decade.g By 1874 Wamsutta had realized a

300 percent profit on its original investment

twenty-fwe years earlier, which proved the

potential of cotton manufacturing in the

city lo In five years at Wamsutta and four

months at Potomska mills drawing mill

plans for new machinery, Howland estab-

lished a firm business and technical knowl-

edge of the textile industry, which he

supplemented during the winter of 1881-

82 with several months of travel to research

cotton yarn manufacture.”

By the time Howland returned to

New Bedford, it was evident from the rap-

idly growing number of weaving mills in

the city that a high market demand for qual-

ity yam existed. In March 1882, at the age

of twenty-nine, he organized the New

Bedford Manufacturing Company, raised

a capital stock of $125,000, and became the

company’s treasurer. After the first yarn

was shipped in January 1883, investors real-

ized that the demand for fine grades ofyarn

was greater than the single mill could sup-

ply. A second mill was built in the spring

of 1886, a combing department was soon

added to refine the spinning process, and

in less than four years capital investment

had increased to five hundred thousand

dollars.‘* This venture demonstrated

Howland’s business credibility and the

strength of his influence and connections,

all of which he could bring to bear to see a

large industrial project through to a profit-

able end, and to realize his vision of

enlightened industrial capitalism in the

Howland Mills complex.13

THE HOWLAND MILLS

In 1886, just as his New Bedford Manu-

facturing Company was expanding,

Howland, Morgan Retch, and two other

company officers organized the Howland


Mills Corporation to supplement the city’s

existing spinning capacity Howland as trea-

surer, company president William J. Retch,

and other investors purchased approxi-

mately 120 acres of land that had once been

part of the estate of Cornelius Howland,

Howland’s maternal great-uncle, and two

other contiguous parcels that had most re-

cently been farm and nursery land.14 The

large tract lay along the western head of

Clark’s Point, which jutted into the ocean

just west of New Bedford’s harbor and was

the southernmost extension of the city

(fig. 4).

Before 1871, Clark’s Point was

largely rural, the site of a wide pleasure

drive, a handful of summer cottages on

large lots, such municipal institutions as the

work farm, hospital, almshouse, and or-

phans’ home, a few, scattered businesses,

and, at its tip, the federal government’s Port

Rodman. With the construction of the

Potomska (1871 and 1877) and Acushnet

mills (1883 and 1887) in the South End

along the western shore of the Acushnet

River, this wooded area began to be trans-

formed into an industrial landscape.

Between 1871 and 1875, city engineers had

blocked out land the Howland Mills would

later purchase, between Bolton Road and

Orchard Street, for large mills separated by

three numbered “Mill Roads” (fig. 5).15 In

effect, the city government had already

zoned the South End for industrial devel-

opment,r6 and the incorporators of the

Howland Mills anticipated considerable

growth as part of that transformation. “The

idea of the purchase of so large a tract of

land,” the company stated in 1889, “was

that the company might profit from the

certain advance in the value of real estate

in the vicinity of the mill.“*7

The first two factories of the

Howland Mills were constructed between

Cove Road and what was designated Mill

Road 2. The first building, four stories

high, took only three months of 1888 to

build and was fitted with maple floors,

steam pipes, and “Edison wires” (fig. 6).18

By 1891, two more mills and another picker

house had been added to create a symmetri-

cal massing between the two mill com-

plexes. l9 Beginning in 1892 Howland

organized and had constructed two addi-

tional mills between Mills Road 3 and 4

for the Retch Spinning Corporation,

which, with forty-two thousand spindles,

manufactured hosiery yarns.*O Though

technically a separate corporation, Howland

viewed the Retch Spinning Corporation as

just another component of what he envi-

sioned as an eight-mill industrial com-

plex-two mills on each of the four mill

parcels that, all told, would employ about

1,200 operatives. Aesthetically, this mod-

ern, thoroughly equipped factory complex

was given the historical bearing of a medi-

eval castle with its corbeled brick and

crenelated towers (fig. 7); its medieval asso-

ciations set against a picturesque, still

largely rural, seaside landscape suggest a

response to what English critic John Ruskin

termed “the dehumanizing, soul-destroy-

ing tasks of modem production.“*’

Yet the Howland Mills was the first

textile concern in New Bedford to choose

an inland location away from the Acushnet

River and remote from existing housing

and transportation. In order to induce

workers to choose this mill over others, its

Old-Time New England 1997 9

Fig. 4. This detail of New Bedford’s South End in 1871 shows the site the Howland Mill complex would occupy,

principally the W? Ashley, C. Crapo, and J. W HowlandlC. Thomas parcels, all undeveloped at the time. Along the

Point Drive was the 1840s cottage of Rachel Howland (purchased by thefamily in 1865), numerous municipal

institutions and public bathingfalilitier, and thefederal property occupied by Fort Rodman at Clark’s Point. The tidal

Acushet River, at right, war (and is) the site of the city’s harbor. Defailfrom Beers’ Atlas of Bristol County, Mass.

(1871); reproduction courtesy New Bedford Free Public Library.

0 1997 Old-Time New England

Fig. 5. This computer-enhanced detail ofthe 1875 city engineers’ map shows the parcels purrhasedfor the Howland

Mills Corporation as well as Mill Roads No. 2, 3, and 4 laid out on the Crap0 parcel, once part of the estate of

Cornelius Howland. Engineering Survey Map of New Bedford (New Bedford: Wheelwright and Coggeshall,

1875); reproduction courtesy New Bedford City Hall.

Fig. 6. Howland Mill No. 1 under construction as seen from Cove Road, 1888. The brickwork took only seven

weeks to complete. Rising upfrom a rural landscape and overlooking Clark’s Cove are thegable-end superintendent’s

house at left, the two-story picker house (where metal machines removed pebbles from raw cotton) in the foreground,

thefour-story mill and stair tower in the background, and the engine house at right. Photograph in William D. Sayer,

ed., New Bedford (1889); reproduction courtesy New Bedford City Hall.


Fig. 7. A drawing of the Howland (lef!, and Retch mills was published in New Bedford’s Morning Mercury on

April 24, 1897. By 1892, the Retch Mill stair towers had been capped with mansard roofs, which distinguished the

corporations as separate entities. Courtesy New Bedford Free Public Library.

planners sought to address both shortcom-

ings with an integrated social and techno-

logical scheme. The newspapers of

Howland’s day gave him almost sole credit

for the highly sophisticated industrial plan,

but in fact it melded Howland’s ideas with

the ideas and skills of architects similarly

immersed in progressive planning at the

time, including the Boston-area firms of

Wheelwright and Haven and Frederick Law

Olmsted, who likely were in charge of the

residential sphere of the master plan.

Howland turned to the housing con-

cerns as Mill No. 1 was being planned and

constructed in 1888. He commissioned

the newly formed partnership of Wheel-

wright and Haven to design a village of

operatives’ housing amidst a series of

wide, curvilinear streets on a gently slop-

ing hillside immediately west of the fac-

tories.” Edmund March Wheelwright

(1854-1912) was only thirty-four years old

when he and Parkman Balke Haven un-

dertook the New Bedford project as one

of the firm’s first, yet he had already

amassed impressive architectural experi-

ence. After graduating from Harvard in

1876, he began his training in architecture

with a year’s study at MIT (1876-77) and

then worked as a draftsman with the

prominent Boston firm of Peabody and

Stearns. Firm principal Robert Swain

Peabody was a New Bedford native,

closely identified with various projects of

municipal improvement, and head of the

Boston City Park Department. Both

Peabody and Stearns and M&m, Mead

and Bigelow in New York, for whom

Wheelwright also worked, distinguished

themselves during the 1880s with a large

number of fine suburban homes and

country estates in the “modern-colonial”

style. Wheelwright’s training in these

firms is apparent in the Shingle Style cot-

tages and picturesque planning of the

Howland Mill Village.23


By early October 1889, the New and a bath room. Every house contains a bath

Bedford Evening Standard reported, twenty- tub. . . . The company manufactures the finest

five ofa planned forty “cottage tenements” quality yarns, and to do this is obliged to hire

had been built next to the Howland Mills the best and most intelligent class of operatives.

“for separate families and of better style To get and secure them, [low rent is part of the]

than other corporation tenements liberality of the corporation in providing

in Bristol County.” The newspaper went pleasant quarters, and [the corporation] second

on to reveal the intent behind the model their[sic] efforts by providing neat furniture,

village: and in some cases handsome flower gardensz4

The houses are in three different styles,

but all differing more or less in details of

dormer windows, form of roof, and other semi-

ornamental features. The roads in the mill

village are slightly winding, and the houses are

more or less irregularly placed, so that the

general look is anything but that of the ordinary

machine made village.

Most of the houses contain a dining or

sitting room, a kitchen, pantry, five bedrooms

Initially, only three streets of the larger resi-

dential site were developed (fig. 8) but by

the end of 1889 the village featured fifty

single-family houses, a large, gambrel-roof

boardinghouse for bachelors (fig. 9), and a

superintendent’s house.= Thirty-five of

these cottages were of a gambrel-roof, cen-

tral hall form consisting of seven rooms

excluding the pantry (fig. 10). The remain-

Fig. 8. The curvilinear plan of the Howland Mill Village as Howland and his architects conceived it was published in

the 1889 history of New Bedford, by which time fwenty-six houses, Mill No. 1, and the mill superintendent’s house

and stables were under construction. By 1895, however, workers’ housing occupied only those spaces where it was

shown on this earlier plan and on the triangular site just above them. Reproduction courtesy New Bedford City Hall.


Fig. 9. The men’s boardinghouse at Howland Mill Village as it appeared about 1920. The dwelling cost thirty-six

thousand dollars to build. Single male mill operatives paid between four dollars andfour dollars andfifty cents for

board and another dollarforjive meals. Photograph in Jessamine Whitney, Infant Mortality, a U.S. Department of

Labor report published in 1920.

ing fifteen were smaller hip-on-gable or

gable-front cottages with five rooms on two

stories. The houses’ massing and orienta-

tion varied; occupants entered either

through the side or through the gable end.

The smaller cottages, which cost one thou-

sand dollars each to build, rented for $8.50

per month. The larger dwellings cost two

thousand dollars each to construct and

rented for ten dollars per month generally

to spinners, skilled workers whose wages

averaged sixteen dollars a week in 1895.26

Most tenants thus paid fifteen percent of

their earnings for rent, and because rents

were deducted weekly from wages earned

the company lost nothing from rents being

in arrears.n

In the Dutch Colonial houses, a col-

umned porch opened into a stair hall, and a

bedroom was designed into the first-floor

plan to serve as an optional space for a

boarder. Most of the cottages were also off-

set on their lots, which accented their infor-

mality compared to the more spatially

constricted corporation housing earlier New

Bedford textile mill owners had built for

their employees (fig. 11). In addition, the

houses occupied lots large enough for a rear

laundry yard and a front garden, both

thoughtfully oriented to allow access from

the cellar laundry tub and food storage areas.

The cottages’ interiors were also designed

with care. The space designed for the cook-

ing range was just below the second-floor

bathroom, whose wall overlapped the

kitchen’s interior wall for the heat advan-

tage. The cottages were each equipped with

a flush toilet, a bathtub, hot and cold water,

and a marble washstand. The principal

rooms were wallpapered. Such appoint-


HOUSE OF HOWLAND MILLS CORPORATION, NEW BEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS.

PLAN No. 54.

Fig. 10. Thirty-fivegambrel-roofcotlages on this Wheelwright and Haven plan were built in the

mill village. Engraving in E. R. L. Gould, Housing ofthe Working People (Washingfon,

1895). Courtesy Library ofcongress.

ments were rare in workers’ housing- sanitation, and suburban landscape design.

indeed, in most housing-in the 1880s. At considerable expense, the Howland and

The design scheme for the mill Retch mills had installed brick sewers

workers’ village also featured sophisticated through the unstable soil conditions around

concepts of reform housing architecture, the salt marsh. According to the city’s


Board of Public Works, the sewer needed

a stone and cement foundation and re-

quired fourteen hundred tons of stone.28

The Howland Mill Corporation also laid

out and graded a road sixty feet wide and

then offered to pay for building gutters on

each side of it if the city Board of Public

Works, upon accepting the road, would

macadamize it. The board applauded the

corporation’s “generous spirit” and noted

its “pleasing contrast to the demands some-

times made on this department.“29 These

street improvements in the immediate

vicinity ofthe new mill complex prompted

the city to provide additional access roads

to the Howland Mill that in effectjoined it

to the city’s street grid.30

Howland specifically requested mac-

adam for his mill roads, for its even sur-

face was found to be easier on horses’ feet

and carriage wheels alike; macadam was

just becoming a preferred paving surface

in American suburbs and parks during the

1890s due particularly to the influence of

the bicycle recreation movement.31 The

wider streets in the Howland Mill Village

also lessened the congestion of commer-

cial traffic while creating, in concert with

the tree-lined village thoroughfares and a

proposed park adjacent to the factories

(fig. 12), what Olmsted had termed

“breathing space.” Together, these land-

scape features offered reliefboth to the mill

worker and urban citizen from the other-

wise predictable industrial realities ofnoise,

congestion, and factory stench.

Fig. 11. Workers’ housing&r the Grinnell Manufacturing Company, established in 1882, lined what is now Ashley

Boulevard in the city’s North End. Courtesy New Bedford Standard-Times.


Fig. 12. Cove Park, which Howland planned across from the Howland and Retch mills, is shown as “proposed park”

on one of the New Bedford plates in an 1895 Bristol County atlas. With the exception of the payroll o&e constructed

in 1898 at the comer of Cove Road and Orchard Street (now the city’s Portuguese-American Club), this plate shows

thefurthest extent of what was envisioned as an eight-mill complex. Plate 3, Atlas of Surveys, Bristol County,

Mass. (Philadelphia: Everts and Richards, 1895); reproduction courtesy New Bedford City Hall.

At the same moment that the sewer

and road systems were reaching comple-

tion, the city’s Union Street Railway was

expanding its service to the Howland Mill

Village. The idea of extending rail service

in conjunction with the ongoing mill con-

struction was discussed as early as 1889,

when Morgan Retch served on the city’s

Board of Public Works, and by 1894 the

railway, again assisted by Retch as a mem-

ber of the Transportation Commission as

well as of the Howland Mills board, had

been extended to the mill complex.32

Howland Mill operatives who did not want

to live in the village or wanted to shop in

the city center could now easily do so; the

railway stopped at the foot of Bolton Street

and Rockdale Avenue, where the factories

and cottages met. The original remoteness

of the Howland Mill site was no longer an

obstacle; in fact, the housing was now

exceptionally convenient both to work and

(with connections to the Globe Street Rail-

way) to outlying commercial and recre-

ational offerings. So strikingly d&rent was

the Howland Mill Village that the 1895

New Bedford City Directory listed it among

“additional places of interest” as a “very

creditable village of mill tenements, con-

veniently arranged and of neat design.“33

The Howland Mill Village was some-

thing of an anomaly in Wheelwright’s ca-

reer. His family paper manufacturing and

printing business had exposed him to in-


dustrial facilities, and his business ledger

indicates that he designed a boardinghouse

during the 1880s for Richmond Paper

Company? But until his term as Boston

City Architect from 1891 to 1895, little

architectural evidence exists of his commit-

ment to social reform.35 Despite Wheel-

wright’s training under architects who were

well aware of progressive housing trends,

it seems likely that the notion of model

workers’ housing was prompted more di-

rectly by Howland’s labor management

philosophy as well as by the need amid

growing competition to attract the most

highly skilled of the city’s industrial labor

force.

Wheelwright’s more fundamental

contributions to the village were probably

its municipal improvements, for which his

workwas praised in its day, and its aesthetic

qualities, of which too little was said. The

markedly picturesque qualities of the cot-

tages, their siting, and the neighborhood

of winding roadways seems to recall Robert

Swain Peabody’s work in the Boston City

Park Department and in private practice,

but, as Wheelwright biographer Carole A.

Jensen has pointed out, Wheelwright him-

self had been involved with resort archi-

tecture in the Penobscot Bay region of

Maine in the 1880s.” In 1883 he had led a

group of Boston friends in the establish-

ment of a vacation colony at North Haven,

and his 1884-85 design for “Stormaway,” a

three-story summer home for Boston law-

yer Moorfield Storey, began his work in the

Shingle style in Maine. He designed the

Islesboro Inn (1890, 1892)and numerous

cottages in Queen Anne and Colonial Re-

vival styles in Maine until at least 1909. The

siting of the Howland Mill Village

superintendent’s house and the massing

formula of the men’s boardinghouse seem

to have been strongly influenced by this

elite architectural tradition.

THE MILLVILLAGE IN CULTURAL

CONTEXT

That the Howland Mill Village was re-

garded not simply as workers’ housing but

as a prototype for a better way of life for

industrial labor is clear in both local and

national accounts. One 1889 New Bedford

history described the cottages as “models

. . . designed for single families [and] attrac-

tive and varied architecture. . . . The terri-

tory has been laid out in accordance with

modern ideas. It will be intersected by

streets fifty and sixty feet wide, and breath-

ing places, which may one day be fitted as

parks, are provided for in the plans.“37 Six

years later, an international study by the

United States Commissioner of Labor cited

the Howland Mill Village as one of six ex-

amples of “model small houses.” It declared

the houses’ plumbing to be “of the most

approved type” and noted that the designs

created “thorough ventilation everywhere.”

‘Waste water and refuse go into the sew-

ers,” the report noted. “An unlimited quan-

tity of water is allowed.“3s

The Howland Mill Village emerged

in a particular climate of concern about the

conditions in which the world’s new indus-

trial populations lived. By 1846, the peril-

ous density of Boston’s working-class

neighborhoods had prompted Harvard

Medical School’s Henry Ingersoll

Bowditch to investigate the public health

aspects of existing workers’ housing.


Bowditch surmised that families of work-

ingmen living outside Boston were

healthier because they “have more room

and better air, and the women and children

might cultivate a small garden.” His pio-

neering research on the causes of tuber-

culosis throughout the 1850s culminated

in his 1862 Consumption in New England and

helped cultivate an awareness that a signifi-

cant relationship existed between local en-

vironment and all aspects of health. “It is

impossible not to draw the inference,”

Bowditch argued, “that there is some inti-

mate relation between the wise policy of

separate homes . . . and the conditions of

public health.“39

The intensity of this critique grew

stronger after the Civil War, whose stag-

gering losses from unsanitary condition’s

and disease newly emphasized the prob-

lem. In New Bedford criticism was leveled

particularly at the housing built by the city’s

two oldest textile corporations, Wamsutta

and Potomska (fig. 13). In 1888 the

Wamsutta Mills responded by installing

water closets, painting its wooden units

different colors to break up the monotony

of the tenement blocks, and providing gar-

dens for the workers near their tene-

ments.40 Nevertheless, public reaction to

the living conditions in mill housing con-

tinued to be harsh: the city’s most promi-

nent minister, Unitarian William J. Potter,

referred to the Wamsutta Village as a “pes-

Fig. 13. About 1848 eight brick boardinghouses were conslrucledfor Wamsutla Mills’ skilled male operatives. Later

corporation housing was wooden and ranged from gable-end sidehall houses to “@-top” three-deckers. Wamsutta

Mills alone owned more than three hundred tenements by 1889. Photograph in Whhey, Infant Mortality (1920).


tiferous excrescence” in 1892, and two

years later a local paper similarly described

the “squalor” that existed in the mill hous-

ing of the Potomska Corporation.4’

Out of this concern grew reform that

placed a high value on the introduction of

design strategies aimed to prevent disease

and promote healthy living in the housing

of industrial workers. Robert Owen’s far-

famed work at New Lana& which he dis-

cussed at length in his 1813 New View of

Society, had set the stage for industrial hous-

ing reform in Europe as well as in the

United States. Surely, given his mother’s

interest in Owen, Howland was aware of

the reformer’s vision of a mixed-use com-

munity that provided a pastoral, aesthetic

quality to the residential area opposite the

mill and the potential economic benefit of

reducing food expenses for the worker.

Howland’s provision of garden space for

each of the fifty Howland Mill cottages may

have been influenced by Owen’s ideas.

Fourierism also stimulated the devel-

opment of new forms ofworkers’ housing

on both sides of the Atlantic.” In 1853 Brit-

ish industrialist Sir Titus Salt, a disciple of

Charles Fourier, created Saltaire, a town

designed for the manufacture of alpaca

woolens on the Aire River in northern

England. Model workers’ houses had also

been displayed at international trade fairs

as early as 1851.43

Model workers’ housing began

appear more regularly in the United States

after the Civil War. In 1871 Bowditch, who

had helped establish the State Board of

Health in Massachusetts several years ear-

lier, worked with other prominent citizens

to establish the Boston Cooperative Build-

ing Company to build and supervise houses

for working men. Bowditch’s studies and

these houses influenced the establishment

of statewide minimal room sizes and adja-

cent outdoor spaces in order to avoid over-

crowding in housing for the American

working population.

Two years earlier, Olmsted had

attempted to articulate the connection he

perceived between landscape architecture

and the quality of life in his upscale River-

side Housing Community in the Chicago

suburbs.44 At Riverside, Olmstead

attempted to bring the advantages of the

city into the countryside by creating con-

venient commuter rail access to Chicago

and installing such amenities as gas, water,

roadways, walkways, and drainage.

Olmsted did notjustfiy these amenities on

humanistic principles alone; such “urban

conveniences,” he argued, would “give any

fuming land in a healthy and attractive situ-

ation the value of town lots.“45 To preserve

the pastoral quality of the town, Olmsted

recommended placing dwellings on lots

fifty or a hundred feet or more apart and at

some distance from the public road. Within

the community gently curving roadways

were designed to suggest “leisure, contem-

plativeness, and happy tranquility,” and its

open, landscaped “public grounds” pro-

vided space for recreation.&

After he created Riverside, Olmsted

argued that just as urban amenities could

enhance rural life, suburban features could

improve city neighborhoods where work-

ers lived. Urban neighborhoods might be

improved by “the construction of good

roads and walks, the laying of sewer, water,

and gas pipes, and the supplying of suffr-


ciently cheap, rapid, and comfortable con-

veyances to towns” and by the provision of

“breathing places.” U Man’s enjoyment of

rural beauty,” he wrote, would be enhanced

by foliage along the streets, which accord-

ing to “modern science” purified the air and

induced “health, virtue, and happiness.” To

allow foliage to reach maturity and the free

flow of traffic, Olmsted suggested wider

streets as well!’

By the early 187Os, the principles

Saltaire and Riverside had begun to put in

place received the endorsement ofEdward

Everett Hale, one of Boston’s most famous

ministers, in his Old and New (1870) and

Workingmen’s Homes (1874). The emphasis

on landscaping in these neighborhoods of

workers’ cottages, Hale declared, “encour-

aged domesticity” and “promoted social-

ity, intercommunication, exercise, and the

enjoyment of pure air.“48 By 1887, as pub-

lic attitudes toward urban density and

workers’ living circumstances shifted, the

Massachusetts Board of Health and both

local and national periodicals charged that

large tenement blocks diminished the qual-

ity of workers’ lives.

In New Bedford, the growing social

and legal pressure to improve the aesthetic

and sanitary conditions of the existing mill

housing had impelled both the Grinnell

and Acushnet mills to build smaller,

detached units in 1882.49 While Howland

Mills was not the first textile corporation

to create detached housing for the city’s

workers, it was the first to break con-

sciously from the grid-like unison of pre-

vious urban mill developments,50 and it

went a great deal further than other exist-

ing New Bedford corporate housing to

address the well-being of workers. The

provision of indoor plumbing in single-

family corporate housing-complete with

flush toilets, hot and cold water, marble

wash basins, bathtubs, and laundry sinks-

was well beyond any explicit legal direc-

tives of the day. 5’ The corporation’s

single-family housing was of recognizable

quality; its indoor plumbing and heating

were well designed; its extensive water,

sewer, and roadway system was markedly

better than contemporary city standards;

and the village avoided the criticisms of

monotony and repetition. Indeed, the

Howland Mill Village incorporated all the

ingredients Olmsted had outlined as criti-

cal: it had wider streets bordered by foliage

to purifjl the air, generous spacing between

family dwellings, and a rail connection.

The significance ofthe Howland Mill

Village becomes clearer when it is com-

pared to the other groups of company-built

“model small houses” cited as exemplary

in the 1895 federal labor commissioner’s

study-those of the S. D. Warren and

Company (Cumberland Mills, Maine); the

Willimantic (Connecticut) Linen Com-

pany; Pullman’s Palace Car Company

(Pullman, Illinois); Merrimac Man~ctur-

ing Company (Lowell, Massachusetts); and

Robert Treat Paine (Boston).

Of these projects, the Lowell,

Willimantic, and Pullman housing predated

the Howland Mill Village, and both

Willimantic and Pullman were infhrenced

by the design principles put in place at

Saltaire.” Still, neither project applied the

principles of suburban-style landscape

architecture and contour planning to work-

ers’ neighborhoods as consistently as did


the Howland Millage Village.53 George

Pullman had hired a noted architect (Solon

S. Beman) and landscape architect (Nathan

F. Barrett) to design his model mill village

in Illinois seven years before Howland

hired Wheelwright and Haven.” But while

there were wide, well-maintained, macad-

amized streets lined with young shade

trees, most of the plan was laid out in a grid;

picturesque landscape features were lim-

ited to the foreground space of the admin-

istration building and the Florence Hotel

(fig. 14).55 Similarly, the Oaks, a neighbor-

hood of forty workers’ cottages planned by

William Eliot Barrows for the Willimantic

Linen Company in Connecticut in 1880,56

only hints at the contour planning prin-

ciples of the romantic suburb tradition.

Perhaps the closest parallel to the

Howland Mills complex, Willimantic

Linen Company began operations in 1857,

and its Mill No. 4, built in 1880, was both

the largest cotton mill in the world and the

first to be designed and built to be illumi-

nated by electricity. 57 Howland certainly

would have known this, as the lighting

demonstrations in themselves attracted

much attention; he may in fact have vis-

ited Wdlimantic when he traveled in 1882

to research cotton manufacturing. At

Willimantic and at the Howland Mills alike,

the mill village paralleled the construction

Fig. 14. This plan of Pullman appeared as an inset to an engraving of the administration building and the Florence

Hotel in atl 1888 article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Curvilinear landscape design appeared only in

front of the hotel, by the lake, and along two sides of the playground, not in areas where workers lived.


of a new mill, and Willimantic’s “modern

group of forty houses” of 1880 was the facet

that attracted the labor department’s atten-

tion (fig. 15).

Barrows, who supervised the design

of the housing as the company’s vice-presi-

dent, believed that by “placing people

among pleasant and beautiful surroundings

they will become more careful, cleanly,

tasteful, and intelligent and therefore . . .

more valuable to their employers.” The

Oaks drew on the physical layout of

Saltaire, midcentury designs for workers’

housing at Lowell, the romantic architec-

tural and landscape designs of Alexander

Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Down-

ing, and even the rustic tradition of the

nearby Methodist campground (1860).58

The cottages were of four different designs

staggered in their order of construction and

in siting arrangement to appear more

diverse. The Oaks also broke with grid

planning and tentatively embraced a cur-

vilinear design.

Many features of the Oaks-from

electric lighting in the mills to embryonic

contour planning, single-family cottages,

gardens, a library and an amusement hall-

existed also or were proposed at Howland

Mill Village. Howland and his architects

even planned forty cottages originally, as at

the Oaks, and their design is strikingly simi-

lar to those at Wrllimantic. Still, the Oaks

lacked the integration of parks, boulevards,

housing, sanitation systems, industry, and

transportation of the Howland plan, and

Fig. 15. The workers’ cottages on Quercus Avenue in Willimantic were photographed as they neared completion in

early 1881. Courtesy Canadian Centerfor Architecture, Montreal.


the majority of the housing was clustered

along only two winding streets.59

Perhaps more significant, and more

distinctly revealing of Howland’s progres-

sivism, is the attitude toward industrial

labor that its design embodied. Pullman

and Lowell were both more thoroughly

integrated with a sophisticated infrastruc-

ture than the Howland Mill Village, and

Willimantic applied, if tentatively, the

design principles of the romantic suburb

to workers’ housing. But the design of

neighborhoods in these three project made

manifest a certain paternalism toward

workers that was virtually absent from

Howland Mill Village. Judging from the

1823 plan for workers’ housing in Lowell,

corporate authority had produced land-

scapes of unified control and visual order

while regulating nearly every aspect of

operatives’ lives as a means of ensuring a

clean and morally upright industrial set-

ting.60 Prospective residents of Pullman had

to apply at the agent’s offrice and, if found

to be of “good character,” were permitted

to sign a one-year lease, which among other

things limited tenants’ freedom to decorate

their homes without written approval. The

company attended to lawns and tenements;

the Pullman resident had yeverything done

for him, nothing by him,” one reporter

observed after an October 1884 visit. One

tenant at Pullman was later quoted in the

ClewlandPost to have stated, “The company

owns everything and it exercises surveil-

lance over the movement and habits of the

people in a way to lead one to suppose that

it has proprietary interest in [their] souls

and bodies.“61

At Willimantic Linen Company’s

Oaks as at the Howland Mill Village,

houses were set aside exclusively for skilled

workers. But the Oaks dwellings were spa-

tially segregated on lots according to rank

in the mill, and situated under the watch-

ful eye of Barrows, whose home, also built

in 1880, was located on a bluff overlooking

the cottage~.~ Barrows believed workers

were like misguided children who could

be reformed by the powers of education

and culture away from inclinations to riot,

strike, and drink All employees residing

in the forty cottages at the Oaks, for ex-

ample, had to maintain gardens, and Bar-

rows had garden inspectors under the guise

of a garden club to ensure that gardens were

properly tended. Barrows gave awards for

the best gardens and had a gardener supply

each home with cuttings.63

The Willimantic Linen Company

also constructed a fashionable Stick Style

building in 1877 with a company store on

the first two floors and, as at Saltaire, a

library and a reading room for employees

and inhabitants of the town in the top

story. 64 Forced upon the workers in

response to a $345,000 increase in city

taxes in 1877, the store took scrip only in

exchange for goods, and while it turned a

considerable profit for the corporation, the

debt operatives incurred there tied them

more closely to the control of the mill

owners. Barrows had also limited the

worker’s freedom of movement by not

connecting the housing to the city’s rail

system. In 1882, he also announced that

all linen company employees who could

not read or write in English by July 4,

1883, would be dismissed-unless they

took free night classes in the Dunham Hall


Library, in effect Barrows’s own crucible

for “social alchemy.“65

Rents were low at Willimantic-they

ranged from 10 to 12.5 percent of tenants’

earnings, as opposed to 15 percent at the

Howland Mills-and the housing was

deemed of “superior character.” However,

five percent of the lodgings were unoccu-

pied. The 1895 labor commissioner’s

report noted, “In 1884 a’well intentioned

agent tried to get all employees under 16

to go from 9 to 10 in the morning to a room

which was heated and well ventilated and

provided seats, where bullion or milk and

crackers were served free. The half hour

following was given to play It was found

that the young people would not go vol-

untarily, and some so far objected to the

practice that they left the works.“66 The

study noted that women resisted being

compelled to leave their working room and

to eat their lunch in this space; some

objected to mixing “with working partners

of objectionable nationalities,” while oth-

ers were embarrassed by the comparison

of their dinner pails.67 Operatives also

resisted the use of magnifying glasses given

to inspectors of thread to protect their eye-

sight. “There is undoubtedly something in

the American temperament, or perhaps one

had better say in the temperament of

laborers working in America, which is hos-

tile to gratuitous help from employers,” the

study concluded. “. . . The people dislike

to feel that they are under control.“68

The Howland Mill Village was flex-

ible and democratic by comparison. The

more emphatic use of contour planning

within the cottage setting, coupled with the

relative absence of company officials in the

housing arrangement, softened surveillance

and public performance. The village in-

cluded a mill superintendent’s house, a

relatively unassuming two-story, gable-

front cottage oriented not to the mill village

and the adjacent factories but to afGord an

unobstructed view of the ocean and Clark’s

Point. Howland and his architects also

never envisioned a company-controlled

shopping district; instead, the trolley pro-

vided access to shopping areas of choice.

Rents at the Howland Mill Village

were reasonable and stable, not having been

raised between the 1888-89 construction

of the mill cottages and 1895. Tenants were

permitted to sublet to other employees in

the mills, and they were allowed to take in

boarders to offset rent payments, which

probably accounted for the fact that five of

the seven rooms in the larger cottages were

bedrooms. Not only could boarders be

taken in, but renters did not have to be

heads of families. Sons or daughters who

worked for the Howland Mills were en-

titled to have their parents live in corpo-

rate housing as long as a corporation

employee paid rent through salary deduc-

tion. Coupled with a general shortage of

worker housing in the South End, these

provisions kept both the cottages and the

men’s boardinghouse full. The boarding-

house even realized an estimated profit of

about three percent of the rental income.69

Tenants of the mill cottages could not

become proprietors of the houses already

built, but they could purchase vacant land

from the corporation and build for them-

selves. Land was to be sold on what was

then referred to as “long time” or a mort-

gage contract, and the company promised


“every reasonable assistance . . . to help

them to build.“‘O Robert Treat Paine had

made an early effort to establish building

and loan associations to help Boston work-

ers buy their own homes, but the practice

of selling rather than renting workers’

housing was still rare in the United States

at the end of the nineteenth century: even

at the later (1896) Bancroft Park housing

development designed and built for the

E. D. and G. Draper Company of

Hopedale, Massachusetts, only the single-

family houses rented by the managers could

be purchased, and then only at the end of

ten years.‘l

Howland’s plan to create a park for

workers at the Howland Mill Village also

suggests his subscription to the progressive

ideas most closely associated in his day with

Olmsted and his onetime associate Charles

Eliot, both ofwhom had major estate com-

missions in New Bedford in the 1880~.‘~

Howland’s family had long and actively

pursued horticulture as an avocation, as had

many of New Bedford’s elite,” and in 1892

he and his business associate Morgan

Retch, then a member of the New Bedford

Park Commission, proposed to sell to the

city land in the Howland Mill Village for a

“Cove Park” situated along a parkway that

the firm of Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot

had proposed to create that year between

three new parks in the city’s extreme north-

em, southern, and western reaches (ulti-

mately Brooklawn, Hazelwood, and

Buttonwood parks) .74 Thirty years later,

one newspaper account held that because

“the artistic side” of the model industrial

complex “made strong appeal” to Howland,

he had “secured famous landscape archi-

tects” to plan the ~a&.‘~ These architects

have not been identified, but the close cor-

relation of the Howland-Retch proposal

with the plans then being put forth by the

Olmsted firm suggest the latter may have

been involved.

By 1875 the city engineering study

had already blocked out sections of the city

for parks, including a “marine park” on

Clark’s Point, then the site of only two

estate-the summer homes ofWilliam D.

Howland and his mother, Rache1.76 In the

early 1890s the Olmsted firm submitted

two proposals for creating an intercon-

nected park-parkway system and for devel-

oping the “marine park” as an integral

component of the system at the abandoned

Fort Rodman, of which the city had been

given custody in 1892 (fig. 16).n A stately

promenade and an adjacent ten-mile,

eighty-foot-wide scenic parkway-all told,

460 acres of scenic open space-would

connect the industrial districts in the north

and south ends of the city. The plan envi-

sioned that wagonettes similar to those at

Olmsted’s Franklin Park in Boston would

carry workers for ten or twenty cents as far

as the Fort Rodman property at Clark’s

Point.‘* Olmsted, Olmsted, and Eliot

emphasized the value of the plan to the city

in a June 1894 letter:

The Clark’s Point property with its grand views

of the bay is remarkably distinctive and fine. . . .

Playgrounds, amusement houses, all construc-

tions however useful, will be subordinated to

the scenery, because of the well known fact that

nothing is so refreshing to the tired towns-

people as pure rural landscape, and because

after acquiring such considerable areas it would


Fig. 16. Olmskd, Olmsred and

Eliot’s proposal for II parkway

connecting New Bedford’s three

main parks would have redesigned

and enhanced existing alignments

from the northernmost park

(Brooklawn) to the southernmost

(“marine park,” south of what

became Hazelwood). Howland’s

proposed Cove Park would have

been along this parkway on the

triangular site at the head of

Clark’s Cove. John Tiitt of the

author’s research team discovered

this illustration and the&n’s

signed proposal in a miscellaneous

file in the building permits

department at New Bedford City

Hall; no other copy of the plan is

known to exist. Courtesy New

Bedford City Hall.

be bad economy for the city to put them to any

other than their highest use.79

Bedford Park Commission, created a year

earlier, had sold bonds for the purpose of

buying lands for the proposed “system of

John C. Olmsted claimed New Bedford’s parks,” and in 1895 it allocated five hun-

marine park would be the “finest on the dred dollars to the Olmsted firm to

Atlantic Coast.” The completed Olmsted, develop a preliminary plan and engineer-

Olmsted and Eliot park/parkway proposal ing study for Buttonwood Park.*’ How-

was estimated to cost two hundred thou- ever, facing new city leadership and a

sand dollars.80 In June 1892, the New national depression, the plans stalled.


Brooklawn Park was created in the North

End, and by 1901 voters reluctantly agreed

to fund Hazelwood Park on the former

grounds of the Howland summer estates

instead of a marine park at Clark’s Point.

But in place of wagonettes on scenic park-

ways connecting these parks and both ends

of the city, streetcars-then the icon of

urbanism-carried workers through the

city and to the parks.

Howland’s vision of a model mill vil-

lage had turned away from social control

aimed at recasting the worker totally in the

image of the corporation to an ideal of com-

munity where the identity (and, following

the views of English social reformers John

Ruskin and William Morris, perhaps even

the joy) of the worker was encouraged in

an atmosphere of greater personal free-

dom.” Perhaps the real significance of con-

tour planning, whether in Olmsted’s

system of parks through New Bedford’s

working-class neighborhoods or in the

Howland Mill Village itself, is the level of

spatial and personal freedom it implied for

the mill worker. In Lowell and Pullman,

the grid in which workers’ housing was

placed and constrained mirrored the rigid-

ity of corporate control over the lives of its

employees both inside and outside the mill

setting. By contrast, as an 1891 article in

the Cleveland Plain Dealer pointed out, the

Howland Mill Village project was intended

to attract and keep skilled workers and

maintain agreeable labor relations without

trade unions:

How can we secure and retain the best class of

operatives? Treasurer Howland laid before the

directors his plan to secure these ends and the

extent to which they have been carried out they

have been remarkably successful. . . . In short,

every effort has been made to attract to the

mills . . . a most desirable class of help. In the

whole scheme there has been nothing philan-

thropic or charitable but every move has been

made on the broadest of economic ideas with a

view to securing and holding the best efforts of

the operatives and thus securing the greatest

amount of work at the least possible cost and

waste. . . . The corporation has paid excellent

dividends [and] good wages have been paid.

. . . Such an undertaking as this carried

out on such a broad plan shows that there need

not be differences between capital and labor

when both endeavor to live together in

harmony There is nothing cooperative in this

scheme, as the term goes, yet the operators reap

many good results from their steady careful

work Mr. Howland has done a great work in

carrying out this undertaking and the benefits

will be wide-reaching _ . . a few more such

ventures as this and we shall see the beginning

of the end of the great struggle between capital

and labor.”

Corporate paternalism certainly existed at

the Howland Mills: as at Willimantic and

Pullman, Howland had identified a future

need for “annexes, such as libraries, read-

ing rooms, or halls for social or literary

reunions” and envisioned “a large brick

building to contain a gymnasium, and

evening school . . . and possibly a reading

room or library; a club room or amusement

room for men and helpfulness for women

conducted on the general lines recognized

in the working girls’ clubs now organized

SO successfullynr” Howland told the clove-

land Plain Dealer that he also hoped to cre-


ate a cooperative insurance company “to

provide against the sickness or disability of

workmen and to aid their families in the

event of their death.“85 Thus Howland

arguably projected certain elite values about

living and recreating onto his workforce

(including the seaside resort image of the

housing), and such benefits as long-term

mortgages and health insurance kept work-

ers tied to the workplace for long periods.

The company also had discharged those

“undesirable or troublesome operatives”

who had attempted to organize a union at

the mills in February 1891.% Later events,

however, demonstrated that Howland

exerted a far less intrusive mode of social

control than most industrialists of his time.

And had the Howland Mills survived, and

Howland’s Cove Park and the marine park

been built and linked to other urban recre-

ational spaces, a very different industrial

landscape might have emerged than what

materialized in the decades after 1900.

THE END OF THE HOWLAND

MILL VILLAGE

Both the Howland Mills and its workers’

village unraveled for the same reasons that

their construction had been initiated and

executed so swiftly-Howland’s connec-

tion with the city’s business and political

elite and his particular dedication to the

welfare of his workers. By all accounts,

Howland had a strong and supportive rela-

tionship with his operatives. When the state

law mandating a ten-hour day was passed

in 1892 (reducing the work week of cer-

tain mill employees from sixty to fifty-eight

hours), most New Bedford mills cut wages

to offset operating costs. Howland, how-

ever, honored the shorter work day and

refused to cut wages. That same year, when

many workers had to be laid off because of

the sharp downturn in the textile market,

Howland lowered the rent and in some

instances did not collect it at all.87

Howland also did not follow the lead

of the New Bedford Manufacturers Asso-

ciation in 1894 when, in response to the

severe downturn in the national economy

the previous year, it shortened hours and

announced two successive wage cutbacks

totaling approximately 25 percent. He was

out of town when the other mill manag-

ers elected to cut back pay rates, but

Howland ultimately resolved to run his

mills at the old pay rates so as not to sever

“the smooth and friendly relations we have

in our mills at the present.“s8 As a result,

Howland’s workers did not strike with the

rest of the city’s ten thousand textile work-

ers on August 20, 1894, and did not have

to accept the 5 percent wage reduction

other workers agreed to when the strike

was settled by arbitration in October.89

Howland Mill operatives instead pre-

sented their mill manager with a certifi-

cate of merit for his attitudes towards his

employees. The American Wool and Cotton

Reporter observed of the Howland Mills in

1894, “A strike is as much an unknown

incident in their whole career as an impair-

ment of their credit.“90

Within three years, however,

Howland’s credit was so substantially

impaired that his mills and his housing

experiment came to an abrupt and sensa-

tional end. The general downturn in the

textile market related to the Panic of 1893

had brought several New Bedford corpo-


rations to the brink of economic disaster, mills to become overcapitalized and exces-

including all three of Howland’s enterprises sively indebted without revealing these

(Howland Mills, New Bedford Manufac- facts to the board of directors. The

turing Company, and Retch Mills). Like “embarrassment” of Howland’s financial

several other New Bedford Mills, they had mismanagement of three corporations,

expanded too quickly in anticipation of a following on the spectacular failure of the

continued high demand for goods and did Bennett and Columbia mills the previous

not allow enough time to retrieve capital. week, shocked the textile interests of the

Moreover, the mill village had come at a city.% Given Howland’s standing in the

high price to the corporation. The land city, the so-called “deceptions of the trea-

upon which the group of model dwellings surer” were handled kindly in the news-

had been built had cost only $3,500, but paper, but the corporations’ excessive debt

sewage, drainage, water connections, and was anathema in the financial community

other improvements totaled $38,000. By Moreover, Howland’s handling of the

1895, the corporation owned fifty houses 1894 strike had created clear divisions

at a total cost of $104,000 and a large board- within the New Bedford textile industry;

inghouse that cost $36,000.91 To these ex- the spinners union was said almost to have

penses were added the costs of the water worshipped Howland, while such textile

system, additional road improvements, and manufacturers as Andrew Pierce felt

perhaps even a share of the 1892 street rail- betrayed by Howland’s actions during the

way extension. With only five thousand strike relative to the agreement several

dollars received annually in rent from all corporations had worked out in his

the dwellings, increased revenues from the absence. This incident and the mills’

property were clearly needed to absorb the indebtedness eroded Howland’s earlier

cost of the infrastructure. Finally, the most base of support among the business inter-

speculative part of the venture-the sale of ests of the city.9s The banks, whose board

lots to workers wishing to build their own of directors were made up of the same mill

houses-was structured in such a way as owners who witnessed Howland’s oppo-

not to permit a quick capital return.92 By sition to lowering wages when the ten-

1897, the rapid expansion of the Howland hour work day was instituted, were no

Mills resulted in $2,069,732 in assets, but doubt concerned about Howland’s radical

the corporation generated only $114,000 in social agenda; by maintaining full produc-

profit and carried $965,000 as debt. With a tion and paying full wages from 1893 to

$200,000 business note coming due, the 1897, when other workers and mill own-

company had only about $40,000 in cash ers were severely cutting back, Howland

with which to pay it. Howland was forced was after all going against the grain not

to request an additional $200,000 from area only of the other mills in the city but of

banks to cover the note.93 the national economy in general.

As treasurer of three separate cor-

porations, Howland had allowed all of the

On April 24, 1897, Walter Clifford,

vice president of the National Bank of


Commerce, which had done much of the three mill corporations under Howland’s

Howland Mills business, told the local direction. Howland’s death also signaled

newspapers that the banks in the city an end to both naturalistic planning and

intended to help Howland’s corporations other socially conscious schemes for hous-

with the note coming due “provided the ing mill operatives in the city. Regretta-

books showed a condition of things which bly, other corporations used Howland’s

would warrant it and an examination was earlier policies, such as his reluctance to

begun.” But the debt caused the banks to lower wages in connection with the man-

withdraw their offer, at which point the dated ten-hour work day, as examples of

mills’ financial difficulties were revealed to how such practices inevitably led to cor-

the public. porate failure.g8

Then, on April 29, William D.

Howland disappeared. Upon hearing the

news and learning of the financial difficul-

ties the mill faced, the operatives in the

Howland and Retch mills took an “unprec-

edented turn” and “expressed their willing-

ness, if it would relieve the stress on the

corporation, to sustain a temporary cut-

down, or even forego their pay days for a

time, till such time as the corporations can

better tiord to make payment.“% But on

May 6, a week after he vanished, the Evening

Standard reported that Howland’s body had

been found that morning under a North

Street pier. He was still wearing his top hat

and gloves and had important bank docu-

ments in his pocket. The newspaper added,

“On Friday morning April 23, Mr.

Howland had a conference with Otis N.

Pierce of the National Bank of Commerce,

when Mr. Pierce announced the decision

of the bank to refuse further credit to the

Howland Corporation unless the books

could be opened to expert examination. . . .

It is generally accepted that the despondent

treasurer took his own life within half an

hour after the time he left his office with

Harry M. Pierce, his bookkeeper.“q

In the end, more was lost than the

The promise that the Howland Mill

Village represented ended suddenly. Its

influence, however, can be seen in work-

ers’ housing at Hopedale, Massachusetts,

and Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, projects that

followed immediately on its heels and that

have previously been accepted as the

benchmarks of picturesque industrial plan-

ning.99 The E. D. and G. Draper Company

of Hopedale had begun its company town

in 1856. But until its 1896 Bancrofi Park

housing development the town had been

laid out on relatively flat terrain in a grid

pattern.““‘Warren Henry Manning (1860-

1938), a member of the Olmsted firm from

1887 to 1896 who had been superintendent

of planting of Buttonwood Park in New

Bedford, had drawn up plans for grading

and planting at Hopedale in 1888. Even if

he had not been involved directly in plan-

ning the Howland Mill Village, Manning

was almost certainly aware of the contour

plan put in place there and may have helped

persuade Hopedale Company officers to

create a similar plan. The design of

Hopedale’s Bancroft Park (about 1898)-

its shingled double-family housing sited on

curved streeis and walks, and its twelve

miles of macadam paving lined with stone


curbing and nearly two miles of side-

walks-is indeed similar to that of the

Howland Mill Village (fig. 17).‘O’ The ex-

pansive shoreline park Manning designed

for Hopedale between 1898 and 1913 also

had precedent in New Bedford’s Cove and

Marine park schemes.

The Howland Mill Village did not,

however, survive the liquidation of the cor-

poration in 1899. The mill assets were

turned over to other parties, the receivers

cut pay rates to match those that prevailed

at other New Bedford mills, and the

workers struck for the first time since the

corporation was organized.lo2 In 1899 the

New England Cotton Yarn Company

bought the corporation, including the mill

housing, the open land along the Dart-

mouth city line, and a small piece of land

on Clark’s Cove (fig. 18).‘03 The area

beyond Dartmouth Street planned for

model mill housing ultimately became the

site of the Sharp Manufacturing Company.

When New Bedford’s economy

recovered by 1901, it was clear to devel-

opers that textiles were in New Bedford to

stay, and speculative builders took over the

rental mill housing market. By 1902, the

cottages designed and built for Howland

Mill operatives became housing for middle

management of the Gosnold Mill, which

had purchased the mill holdings from the

New England Cotton Yarn Company that

year. Other speculation followed. The

undeveloped area north of the Howland

Mill Village, originally set aside for sale to

Howland operatives, became packed with

large, multifamily three-decker rental flats

built predominately during the 1910s by

local land developer Joseph T. Kenney to

accommodate Sharp Manufacturing Com-

pany and Gosnold Mill employees.‘” The

space laid aside for the proposed but never

completed park in the Howland Mill Vil-

Fig. 17. The housing at Hopedale under construction, about 1898; photograph in Model Factories and Villages

(London, 1905).


Fig. 18. The 1911 Walker map of New Bedford shows the mill village amid the property purchased by New England

Cotton Yarn Company in 2899. The area north of the mill village had been subdivided into small lots and would be

filled with three-deckerr housing workers at Gosnold, Retch, and Sharp mills. Courtesy New Bedford City Hall.

lage was largely taken over by the Page Mill Park, an “amusement house” of precisely

between 1906 and 1909. By 1920 the area the sort Olmsted had hoped to avoid.‘05

the Olmsted firm proposed for a marine New Bedford’s mill and housing

drive and park was described as being “cov- practices were set, therefore, on a very dif-

ered with mills and tenement houses,” and ferent course, and the city’s biggest textile

city residents spent leisure time at Acushnet boom was still ahead. In the decade follow-


Fig. 19. The Howland Mill Village, 1996. Dhotograph by Kingston Heath.

Fig. 20. A srreet of New Bedford triple-deckers; photograph in Whitney, Infant Mortality (1920).


ing Howland’s death, from 1900 to 1910,

New Bedford witnessed its greatest mill

expansion and its greatest increase in popu-

lation.‘06 The sheer volume of mills (sev-

enty by 1923 as opposed to fifteen when

the Howland Mill was built) and the need

to house so many more operatives

demanded a very different housing

response. The entry of speculative build-

ers into the housing market freed up mill

owners’ investment capital for new corpo-

rations and thus fanned the rate of mill

expansion. In addition, after the precedent

of the 1895 Whitman Mill, out-of-city

investors began to incorporate New

Bedford textile mills. The era of local gov-

ernance over New Bedford’s economic and

physical destiny, which the city’s leading

families had fashioned in the eighteenth

century, was thus challenged by new mill

owners and housing developers alike.

These developments, coupled with the

temporary downturn in the national

economy, doomed the Howland Mill Vil-

lage. “Practical men took hold of the situa-

tion and then covered the mill districts with

three and four deckers and sham built

houses with ‘modem improvements,“’ one

retrospective newspaper article noted in

1922. “. . . Then the city came along and

straightened the winding roads designed by

Mr. Howland’s landscape architects and

spoiled a vision of Mr. Howland which

deserved better consideration.“‘m

In the summer of 1996, the Retch

Mill complex adjacent to the Howland

Mills was razed. However, the bachelors’

boardinghouse, albeit modified, and

approximately forty-four of the original

fifty Howland Mill cottages still stand

(fig. 19), as do Howland Mills Nos. 1 and

2, adaptively reused as retail space. Today

the housing and the mills are one of the

city’s few remaining complexes of mills and

adjacent workers’ housing as well as a

model mill village of national signifi-

cance.‘O* In its wake, the three-decker

builders not only offered a new housing

alternative to the city’s working population

from the 1890s on, but they also con-

structed a new regional identity for New

Bedford as a truly industrialized city

(fig. 20). Howland and his architects had

offered a vision of unity between nature and

technology and the promise of enlightened

industrial management, a unique urban

vision that was sandwiched between

paternalistic planning on the part of the

powerful few and the entrepreneurial

efforts of the many and that gave way in

the end to an omnipresent commonality of

design.lOg *

NOTES

This paper is part of a forthcoming book

entitled The Patina of Place: The Cultural Weath-

ering of a New England Industrial Landscape, cur-

rently being revised for publication by the

University of Tennessee Press. The author

would like to acknowledge Tina Furtado and

Joan Barney of the New Bedford Free Public

Library for their constant, effective, and gener-

ous assistance with this article. Joseph Thomas

of New Bedford’s Spinner Publications shared

photographs of the Gosnold Mills from his

collection. Llewellyn Howland III offered

many significant insights into his family his-

tory, shared his family correspondence, and

reviewed earlier versions of the manuscript.


1. Patricia Raub, “Another Pattern of

Urban Living: Multi-family Housing in

Providence, 1890-1930,” Rhode Island

History 48 (February 1990): 6, table 5.

2. Rachel S. Howland to Matthew Morris

Howland, Sept. 28, 1881, Howland

Family Correspondence, 1878-84,

collection of Llewellyn Howland III,

Jamaica Plain, Mass.

3. Morgan Retch, a corporate officer of

the Howland Mill Corporation, had

been the mayor of New Bedford

between 1885 and 1888, when the

Howland Mill was being organized.

Retch continued to facilitate the

company’s expansion at critical points as

a member of the Board of Public Works

and the Park Commission. He was also a

close friend of Morris Howland, William

D.‘s older brother. William D. Howland

himself was a director of the National

Bank of Commerce, which his grandfa-

ther had founded and of which his father

was president. This bank handled many

of the business transactions of all three

of the corporations for which Wrlliam D.

Howland served as treasurer.

4. As in many urban areas up to the turn of

the twentieth century, no administrative

distinction was made between govern-

ment and business; see, for example, the

discussion of New York City’s adminis-

trative structure in Christopher Tunnard

and Henry Hope Reed, American Skyline

(New York: Signet, 1956), 135. Such

clarification of city government’s power

was just beginning to appear in New

Bedford during the 1890s with such city

agencies as the New Bedford Park

Commission, established in 1891, and

the Department of Building Permits,

established in 1893.

Howland family correspondence from

the 1870s exists in several collections,

but none of William D. Howland’s

letters or business ledgers have survived.

Rachel Howland’s prominent social

standing in Philadelphia allowed her

direct access to people of political and

intellectual import, from President

Lincoln to Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her

day. See William M. Emery, The Howland

Heirs (New Bedford, Mass.:

E. Anthony and Sons, Inc., 1919), 197.

Daniel Georgianna and Roberta

Aaronson, The Strike of 1928 (New

Bedford, Mass.: Spinner Publications,

1993), 31-32. See page 53 for an

informative chart listing “Prominent

New Bedford Families on Bank, Mill

and Other Board Directorates” by 1928.

Though much later than Howland’s era,

the high degree of influence that this

handful of prominent families wielded

up to the collapse of the textile economy

following the 1928 strike suggests a

similar if not stronger business dynamic

in Howland’s time. See William D.

Howland, Noteworthy Career of the

Unfortunate Mill Treasurer,” The

Evening Standard (New Bedford), May 6,

1897, 1, 8; Emery, Howland Heirs, 197,

205-6, Everett S. Allen, Children of the

Light: 7’he Rise and Fall of New Bedford

Whaling and Death of the Arctic Fleet

(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973),

85, 148-49; David Montgomery, Beyond

Equality: Labor and Radical Republicans,

1862-1872 (New York: Random House,

1967), 289-90; New Bedford Evening


Standard, Mar. 5 and 6, 1867; New Bedford

Daily Mercury, Mar. 5 and 6, 1867;

Thomas A. McMullen, “Lost Alternative:

Urban Industrial Utopia of William D.

Howland,” New England Quarterly 55, 1

(1982): 32.

8. Llewellyn Howland III, telephone

interview with author, Oct. 3, 1995.

Though often autocratic in his manage-

ment practices, Robert Owen (1771-

1858) was also one of the pioneers of

labor law, the cooperative movement,

and trade unions. In 1817, he put forth

a report for the Committeefor the Reliefof

the Manufacturing Poor and proposed an

ideal settlement based on collective land

use, self-sufficiency, and the mixed use

of cultivated land and industry. Owen

incorporated these principles of social

reorganization in his planning of a

model industrial city at New Harmony,

Indiana, in 1825. See Leonardo

Benevolo, History of Modern Architecture

(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,

1977), 1:148-51.

9. Howland’s 1874 graduation is verified by

the Brown University Archives at the

John Hay Library. The date given in

Emery, Howland Heirs, 205-6, is 1879.

Llewellyn Howland III suggests that

Howland may have spent a year abroad

and a brief time keeping the books for

the Howland whaling fleet before

beginning work at Wamsutta Mills. That

Howland was probably promoted from

clerk is stated in a letter from his oldest

brother, Richard S. Howland, to him,

dated Sept. 5, 1879. ‘Yesterday father

said that you are feeling very well about

your new position at Wamsutta and like

10.

11.

12.

the work-which is not so confining as

formerly.” That Howland was in charge

of redesigning two of the Potomska mills

for new machinery is stated in a letter

from his father, Matthew, to his brother

Morris, Jan. 31, 1880; according to his

father, William told mill owner Kilburn

that “he would rejoice to do it, but that

he had all he could do in the office.

Then Kilburn said he should be released

from that, so Will is rejoicing that

perhaps he will have little if any more

work as clerk in the office.” Howland

Family Correspondence.

William D. Sayer, ed., New Bedford (New

Bedford, Mass.: Mercury Publishing

Co., 1889), 146; Leonard Bolles Ellis,

History of New Bedford (Syracuse, N.Y.: D.

Mason and Co., 1892), 458; Judith Boss

and Joseph Thomas, New Bedford: A

Pictorial History (Virginia Beach, Va.: The

Donning Co., 1983), 150.

Richard S. Howland to William D.

Howland, Dec. 29, 1878, Mar. 17 and

Apr. 28, 1879; Matthew Howland to

Matthew M. Howland, July 18 and Oct.

28, 1881, Howland Family Correspon-

dence. Cited in McMullen, “Lost

Alternative,” 26.

The officers of the New Bedford

Manufacturing Company were president

Charles W. Clifford, replaced shortly

by Morgan Retch; treasurer William D.

Howland; and directors Oliver I?

Brightman, Charles W. Clifford,

Edmond Grinnell, Charles W. Plummer,

Edward T. Pierce, William D. Howland,

and David Wood. The company origi-

nally intended to refit a flour mill in the

city’s North End as a factory but instead


13.

14.

15.

built a new eleven-thousand-spindle mill

just north of New Bedford’s center

along the Acushnet River. Construction

of the second mill brought the total

number of spindles to thirty-seven

thousand. See Sayer, New Bedford, 158-

62, and “Howland Mills Involved,” The

Morning Mercury, Apr. 24, 1897.

Rachel Howland to Morris Howland,

Jan. 11, 1883, notes that her son

William’s mill stock had increased in

value while the value of Grinnell Mill

stock had declined. “Quite a feather in

his cap,” she wrote her younger son.

“Well, he drives early and late and means

to make a success of it.”

“Howland Mills Corporation. An

Organization of the Company Effected

To-day,” Evening Standard, May 19, 1888.

The meeting of the incorporators of the

new cotton manufacturing enterprise

was held at the National Bank of

Commerce, of which William D.

Howland was a director. It was organized

with capital stock of $350,000. The

purchased tracts are indicated in the Plan

of City of New Bedfordfrom Original

Surveys by].C. Sidney, C.E. (Philadel-

phia: Collins and Clark, 1850). They

appear as well in the 1871 Beers map of

Bristol County.

Comparing the 1871 city atlas to the

1875 city engineering survey maps makes

clear that industrial subdivision lots had

been platted between those years east of

Crapo Street to County Street north of

Cove Road. These subdivisions are

shown on two maps published by

Wheelwright and Coggeshall in 1875 as

part of an extensive planning study. One

16.

17.

18.

19.

was a civil engineering and sanitation

map; the other was a plat map for

present and future development. These

maps were discovered in May 1996 by

Ed Portis of my research team in the

attic of the New Bedford City Hall.

These 1875 maps also show the sites for

Brooklawn, Buttonwood, Hazlewood,

and the marine park; thus an urban plan

for New Bedford was in place by this

date. Olmsted may have worked from

this map to develop his system of parks

in 1892.

Related to William D. Howland, Henry

Howland Crapo II, son of William

Wallace Crapo, was on the original board

of directors for the Potomska Mill in

1871 and may have convinced his father

between 1871 and 1875 to consider mill

development, actual or speculative, in

the South End. Hence, the incorporation

and construction of the Howland Mills

may have moved smoothly in part

because a spinning mill complex fit

within the anticipated production needs

of other mills in which the family and its

relations had a vested interest.

Sayer, New Bedford, 165.

Howland had been in charge of repairing

older machinery at Wamsutta Mills, and

in 1880 he installed new machinery into

Nos. 2 and 4 Potomska Mills, said to

have saved “the labor of 50 operatives.”

These tasks, combined with his work in

1881 to draw up plans for a new mill at

the Potomska complex, had surely given

him ample background to understand a

mill’s technological needs.

For details on the mills’ construction,

see “Howland Mills Corporation,” New


20.

21.

22.

23.

Bedford Evening Standard, May 19, 1888;

“The New Cotton Mills, Rapid Work in

the Construction of the Howland Mill,”

New Bedford Evening Standard, Aug. 14,

1888; and ‘The Howland Mills,” New

Bedford Evening Standard, Mar. 15, 1889.

The plans for the 1898 payroll offrce,

produced after the reorganization of the

Howland Mill but before the corpora-

tion was liquidated in 1899, are on file in

the attic storage of the New Bedford

Building Department, New Bedford

City Hall.

‘Howland Mills Involved. Three More

Cotton Corporations Found to be in

Financial Straits,” The Morning Mercury,

Apr. 24, 1897, 1.

John Ruskin, “Nature of the Gothic,” in

Stones of Venice (1853).

New Bedford Evening Standard, Aug. 14

and Dec. 14, 1888; Jan. 1 and Oct. 3,

1889, Feb. 25, 1891; Boston Globe, Jan.

18, 1920, and Feb. 4, 1922, in Boston

Globe Scrapbook, camp. Zephaniah

Pease, New Bedford Free Public Library.

See also McMullen, “Lost Alternative,”

26. Edmund March Wheelwright’s work

is noted briefly in Douglass Shand Tucci,

Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1800-

1950 (Boston: New York Graphic

Society, 1978), 195, and Carole A.

Jensen, “Edmund M. Wheelwright,” A

Biographical Dictonary of Architects in Maine

4, 13 (1987).

For more on Wheelwright, Peabody,

and the other principals in these firms,

see Henry F. Withey and Elsie Rathburn

Withey, Biographical Dictionary of American

Architects (Deceased) (Los Angeles:

Hennessey and Ingalls, Inc., 1956/1970),

24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

273,462-63, 568, 648-49. See also

Jensen, “Edmund M. Wheelwright.”

According to Withep Wheelwright began

practice under his own name in 1885,

not, as Jensen states, 1883; Withey also

states that Wheelwright was trained as

well at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts, while

Jensen contends Wheelwright never

officially attended the school. Thus the

Howland Mill Village would not have

been his first commission. The date

of the partnership of Wheelwright

and Haven is variously given as 1888

and 1890.

New Bedford Evening Standard, Oct. 3,

1889; see also Aug. 14, 1888.

“Mill Notes. The New Howland Mill to

be Double the Size of No. 1,” Evening

Standard, Jan. 1, 1889. Several fine

photographs of the superintendent’s

house and outbuildings as they appeared

along Cove Road at Orchard Street in

1912 are in the possession of Thomas

Whittaker in New Bedford. Whittaker’s

grandfather had been the superintendent

of the Gosnold Mill, which took over

the Howland Mill shortly after it failed.

E. R. L. Gould, Eighth Special Report of the

Commissioner of Labor: Housing of the

Working People (Washington, D.C.:

Government Printing Oftice, 1895), 325.

Gould, Eighth Special Report, 325.

New Bedford City Documents 10, Decem-

ber 1892, Board of Public Works, 26:

“The brick sewer on Orchard Street,

from the Howland Mill No. 2 to the

Retch Spinning Corporation, was

rendered quite costly by the depth of the

marsh mud which made it necessary to

build a stone and cement foundation.


29.

30.

31.

32.

This foundation was fifteen feet wide at

the bottom and carried up half the

height of the four-foot brick sewer.”

New Bedford City Documents 10, January

1891, Board of Public Works, 12.

New Bedford City Documents 10, January

1892, Board of Public Works, 12.

Robert A. Smith, Merry Wheels and Spokes

of Steel: A Social History of the Bicycle,

Stovkis Studies in Historical Chronology

and Thought 16 (New York: Borgo

Press, 1995). On macadam roads in New

Bedford, see New Bedford Cify Documents

10, December 1893, Board of Public

Works, 13.

“Mill Notes,” New Bedford Evening

Standard, Jan. 1, 1889, reported, “The

Dartmouth Street line of railway will

soon be extended farther toward the

Howland Mill village, and there is talk

of extending the Old Colony railroad to

the Potomska, Acushnet, Hathaway and

Howland Mills.” See also New Bedford

City Documents 10, December 1892,

“Street Railways,” 42. The line to

Howland Mills was one of only two

lines in the city operated by electric

power. An electrified street-level line

with an overhead conductor was

successfully demonstrated in Richmond,

Va., in 1887; by 1892 more than eight

thousand electric cars ran on city streets

in the United States. See Alan Marcus

and Howland Segal, Technology in America

(San Diego, Calif: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, Inc., 1989), 151-55, and

Carroll Pursell, The Machine in America:

A Social History of Technology (Baltimore,

Md.: The Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1995), 136. See also New Bedford

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

38.

39.

40.

City Documents 10, January 1892,

Board of Public Works under “Transpor-

tation Report.”

New Bedford City Directory (1895), 60.

Special thanks to Carole A. Jensen for

her letter to author of Apr. 7, 1997,

about entries in Wheelwright’s ledger

associated with social reform issues and

workers’ housing.

See Carole A. Jensen, “Edmund M.

Wheelwright,” in A Biographical Dictionary

ofArchitects in Maine 4, 13 (1989),

published by the Maine Historic

Preservation Commission.

Caroline T. Daniels, Dark Harbor

(Cambridge, Mass.: np, 1935), and

Jensen, “Edmund M. Wheelwright,” 52.

Sayer, New Bedford, 165-66.


Interestingly, Bowditch resisted the

notion of workers living in the suburbs

and argued that laborers wanted to live

near their work, that railroads objected

to lowering rates for laborers, and that

passengers would find the large numbers

of workers assembled at the depots

annoying. Howland solved these

problems by placing workers’ homes

near the mills, essentially bringing the

suburbs to the workplace, and by

providing a rail service predominately

for the laborers, much like the “mill

buses” of the modern era. For more on

Bowditch, see David F? Handlin, The

American Home: Architecture and Sociery,

1815-1915 (Boston: Little, Brown and

Company, 1979), 253-55,256-58.

See Thomas McMullen, “Industrializa-

tion and Social Change in a Nineteenth-

Century Port City: New Bedford,


41.

42.

43.

Massachusetts, 1865-1900” (Ph.D.

diss., University of Wisconsin, 1976)

and McMullen, “The Coming of the

Mills: Social Change in New Bedford in

the Late Nineteenth Century” (Lecture

in a series for the New Bedford Bicen-

tennial, New Bedford Free Public

Library, 1987), 6.

McMullen, “Coming of the Mills,” 6, 7.

On Potomska’s housing, see New Bedjord

Daily Mercury, Aug. 23, 1894.

Fourierism was based on the ideas of

French socialist Charles Fourier (1772-

1837), who believed in enhancing

workers’ lives by providing pleasant

surroundings, offering good working

conditions, and reorganizing the

structure of society into cooperative

communities. Brook Farm (1841-47) in

West Roxbury, Massachusetts, was one of

several antebellum utopian communities

based on Fourierism.

Model workers’ housing was exhibited

in London in 1851 and in Paris in 1867,

and the first international housing

congress met in Paris in conjunction

with the 1889 Paris Exposition, when

Howland Mills was being planned. Such

international expositions continued,

predominantly in Europe, through 1910.

Model housing was displayed at the

World’s Columbian Exposition in

Chicago in 1893. See John Garner,

The Model Company Town (Amherst:

University of Massachusetts Press,

1984), 110-16.

44. The popular awareness of Olmsted’s

Riverside Park was almost immediate.

Two years later, Lysander Flagg began a

resort development in East Providence,

45.

46.

R.I., with a group of businessmen from

Providence and Pawtucket. Flagg’s

enterprise, named the Riverside Land

Company, was a miniaturized version of

Olmsted’s model American suburb. It

grew into a flourishing resort over the

next three decades and certainly would

have been known to Howland because

his oldest brother Richard was the

publisher and editor of the Providence

Journal during the 1880s. The irregular

arrangement of the summer cottages and

the use of patterned shingles may have

had an influence on Howland’s desire

for simple worker’s cottages similar to,

but on a smaller scale than, those

Wheelwright was building in Maine. See

Richard Longstreth, “East Providence,

Rhode Island” (Statewide Preservation

Report, Rhode Island Historical

Preservation Commission, September

1976), 36-39. Special thanks to Richard

Longstreth for bringing this community

plan to my attention.

Frederick Law Olmsted, “Public Parks

and the Enlargement of Towns” (1870),

reprinted in S. B. Sutton, Civilizing

American Cities: A Selection of Frederick

Law Olmsted’s Writings on City Landscapes

(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971),

52-59. See also Olmsted, “Public Parks

and the Enlargement of Towns,“]ournal

ofSocial Science 3 (1871): l-36, and “The

Justifying Value of a Public Par+“]ournal

of Social Science 12 (1881): 147-64.

Olmsted, Vaux and Co., “Preliminary

Report upon the Proposed Suburban

Village at Riverside” (New York, 1868),

3,7. For background on the precedents

for the romantic suburb see John Archer,


47.

48.

49.

50.

“Country and City in the American

Romantic Suburb,“Joumrrf offhe Society

of Architectural Historians 42, 2 (May

1983): 139-56.

Olmsted articulated these ideas in his

February 1870 presentation at Boston’s

Lowell Institute and his 1881 article,

‘The Justifying Value of a Public Park”

Hale quoted in Handlin, American Home,

246-58; see especially the sources listed

on 247.

The Acushnet Mills owned twenty-three

story-and-a-half frame cottages that

served as single-family residences for its

operatives, while Grinnell provided a

cohesive block of twenty-seven housing

units neatly arranged in three rows of

gable-end, two-tenement houses. See

Sayer, New Bedford, 157.

In 1876, Olmsted had addressed the

problem of erecting multiple dwellings

in New York City, where the density of

the population and the constricting

pattern of the grid limited the placement

of all buildings to one orientation.

Additionally, the proximity of the houses

limited access to the backyards. This was

a problem particularly in the old urban

contexts prior to the installation of gas,

water, or sewage systems, and it created

garbage, trash, and privacy issues for

tenants when service people had to go

through the connected side alleyways of

the units. Olmsted preferred to alter this

grid arrangement for urban multiple

housing by providing greater space

between buildings, introducing more

variety in the design of the buildings,

and adjusting their orientation to the

street. See Handlin, American Home, 200.

51.

52.

53.

While corporations were being pressured

to address the sanitary conditions of

their rental flats by the late 188Os, not

until 1896 did the Record of Building

Permits in the City of New Bedford

even include “water closets” as a

category in its building descriptions for

the general population. A building

permit issued on Jan. 3, 1896, to John

Kothusau allowed George K. Teachmur

to build two two-and-one-half story

three-unit tenements in the North End

mill district with no water closets. City

codes clearly were slow to enforce

regulations that affected the local

speculative builder. The federal census

of 1890 indicates that there were

approximately eight occupants per living

unit in New Bedford’s Ward 1, where

Teachmur’s tenements were. Thus each

three-unit tenement would have held

approximately twenty-four inhabitants

with no inside sanitary facilities.

Though he always denied any outside

influence on Pullman, George Pullman

had modeled his company town in part

after Saltaire, which he may have visited

during his trip to Europe in 1873. Like

Saltaire, Pullman provided impressive

brick housing set amidst pleasant

surroundings and offered such amenities

as a library for the workers.

As early as 1855. Franklin Fairbanks had

applied his horticultural interests to

selected areas of the grounds of the

Fairbanks Scale Works in the Fairbanks

Village of Saint Johnsbury, Vermont.

Gradually by 1884 he had employed

contour planning on a large scale to this

village. However, while it stands as a


54.

55.

56.

57.

prime example of the use of village

improvement principles similar to those

Andrew Jackson Downing espoused as

editor of The Horticulturist in 1850, the

village plan does not seem to employ the

full range of design elements as a single,

integrated plan as at the Howland Mill

Village. For more on Fairbanks Village,

see Garner, Model Company Town, 68-77.

For more on the planning of the town of

Pullman, see Stanley Buder, Pullman

(New York: Oxford University Press,

1967), 25-27. At Pullman, the scale of

the enterprise was much larger than at

the Howland Mills: more than four

thousand acres were acquired, and the

size and variety of housing accommoda-

tions also ranged from detached housing

to barrack tenements.

Harper’s applauded the variety of design

in individual housing units, whose

diverse roof forms avoided “unbroken

uniformity,” but disapproved of the

fact that the lawns separating the

houses from the street were always the

same width.

The son of a distinguished theologian,

Barrows had initially been hired in

1874 as an assistant treasurer to organize

the Willimantic Linen Company’s

finances. Quickly gaining the support

of founder Austin Dunham’s hberal-

minded son, he became vice-president

in 1877 and then president in 1882-83.

See Thomas R. Beardsley, Wilfimantic

Industry and Community (Willimantic,

Conn.: Windham Textile and History

Museum, 1993).

The Willimantic mills acted as experi-

mental workshops for the new electric

58.

59.

60.

light technology, and in 1882 they

dispensed with the Brush arc light

system and adopted Edison’s “incandes-

cent plant” throughout. Howland Mills

installed “Edison wires” seven years

later. See Beardsley, Willimantic, Chap. 4.

Barrows’s Irish landscape gardener,

Dwight Potter, is said in particular to

have been influenced by the work of

Downing and Davis. For more on

Barrows’s influence on Willimantic see

Beardsley, Willimantic, Chap. 3.

For the 1880 period of housing develop-

ment at Willimantic, see the Special

Federal Census Schedules for Con-

necticut at the Connecticut State

Library, Hartford, for 1880 under

Industry; the original volumes are in

Vault 11 or microfilm 317.46 fc76clOma.

See also the U.S. Government’s Tenth

Manufacturing Census (1880), published

in 1882. For a period perspective on

Willimantic see Budgett Meakin, Model

Factories and Villages: Ideal Conditions of

Laborer and Housing (London: T. Fisher

Unwin, 1905). Apart from naturalistic

planning, the thirty single- and double-

family cottages built by the Ludlow

Associates in Springfield, Mass., 1879-81

rank among the best nineteenth-century

workers’ housing. Folio-sized plates

appear in Carroll D. Wright, “Report on

the Factory System of the United

States,” bound with the 1880 U.S.

manufacturing census.

See Lawrence Gross, The Course of

Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills

of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-l 955

(Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1993), and James E.


61.

62.

Vance, Jr., The Continuing City: Urban

Morphology in Western Civilization

(Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1990), 83-85. Com-

pany-owned housing still accommodated

one-quarter of the Boott Mill employees

in 1888-91. Set policies governed the

conduct of both residents and keepers,

and the agent was free to exercise his

power as he saw fit. Gross has noted,

“Continued provision of housing

allowed the agent, if he wished, to

extend his power into the lives of the

worker while in the community . . .

Eviction remained [agent] Cumnock’s

ultimate rebuke. Standards were

based on Cumnock’s beliefs, not work-

related issues. . . . Despite the inherent

difficulties of landlordism, Cumnock . . .

[used] his position as an opportunity to

‘purify the corporation.“’

Elp “Pullman: A Social Study,” 452-66;

resident quoted in Buder, Pullman, 99.

Written criticism of the Pullman

experiment had begun by 1885. See

Buder, Pullman, 86-92.

In 1883 George Pullman lured Barrows

away from Willimantic to aid in the

further planning of his extensive

industrial site for the Pullman Palace

Car Company as its vice-president.

Pullman hoped that the ideal workers’

community-with its lake vista and

picturesque gardens in the public

square-would help to ease worker

unrest, but the disastrous strike at

Pullman in 1894 proved otherwise. See

Beardsley, Willimanfic, 48. Barrows

resigned from Pullman on Dec. 5, 1884,

and is suspected of having told Johns

63.

Hopkins University professor Richard T.

Ely about the “benevolent feudalism” at

Pullman. See Richard T. Ely, “Pullman:

A Social Study,” Harper’s New Monthly

Magazine, February 1885,452-66. Buder,

Pullman, 102, 104, makes reference to a

Walter E. Barrows, not William E.

Thomas Beardsley, interview with

author, Oct. 9, 1995, Willimantic, Conn.

The author is indebted to Beardsley for

the tour of the Willimantic “Oaks” and

surrounding sites he gave to me and my

students from the University of North

Carolina at Charlotte. See also Beardsley,

Willimantic, 33.

The association of gardening with

social harmony and good moral standing

within a community was a product of

the midcentury village improvement

movement, whose spokesman was the

Reverend Birdsey Grant Northrop of

Connecticut. In his Rural Improvement,

Northrop recommended gardening as a

way to create “better factory surround-

ings . . _ cultivate public spirit and town

pride [and] secure better hygiene

conditions” and to make “factory

buildings and tenement houses inviting,

comfortable, and healthful.” In short,

gardens in industrial settings were

believed to rectify the image of industrial

towns, to promote health and social

interaction, and-as an alternate to

owning a house and lot-to ally

management and labor in the responsi-

bility of village improvement. Barrows

even placed exotic plants and stained

glass in Mill No. 4 at Willimantic to

soften the distinction between home and

work. For the connection between these


64.

65.

66.

67.

ideas and the “village improvement

movement,” see Handlin, American

Home, 94, 115-16. For a large-scale

example of the achievements of village

improvement as it came to represent

industrial enlightenment and the

maintenance of social and environmental

harmony, see Garner, Model Company

Town, 62-65, 68-77, on Fairbanks Village

in Saint Johnsbury, Vt.

Beardsley, Willimantic, 35-36. Other mill

villages of the era offered philanthropic

architecture as an opportunity for self-

improvement for their employees.

Hazard Memorial Hall in Peace Dale,

R.I.; Cheney Hall in South Manchester,

Conn.; the Fairbanks Museum in St.

Johnsbury, Vt.; and the Town Hall and

Bancroft Memorial Library in Hopedale,

Mass., were designed as community

facilities. Free libraries were built for

factory employees at the Fairbanks Scale

Works in Saint Johnsbury and the Ames

Tool and Shovel Company of North

Easton, Mass.

Beardsley, Willimantic Industry and

Community, 39. The phrase “social

alchemists” was used by Daniel Pidgeon,

English engineer and travel writer, in

his book Old World Questions and New

World Answers (London: Kegan, Paul,

Trench and Company, 1884). Pidgeon

had visited Willimantic in the spring

of 1883 in time to view Barrows’s

social experiment.

Gould, Eighth Special Report, 328;

Beardsley, Willimantic Industry and

Community, 37-40.


According to Beardsley in a persona1

68.

69.

70.

71.

interview, the “objectionable nationali-

ties,” in the eyes of American workers

of English descent, were probably Irish

and French-Canadian workers.

Gould, Eigktk Special Report, 328.

Ibid., 326-27. Single male operatives

were charged $4.00-54.50 a week for

board, while day boarders paid $1.00 for

five meals. The proprietor chose a

person to operate the premises in

exchange for rent and all profits accrued.

Ibid., 326. “Capital and Labor in

Harmony Howland Mills Held Up as a

Model by the Cleveland Plain Dealer,”

reprinted in The Evening Standard, Feb.

25, 1891 stated, “These homes are sold

to operatives who desire to purchase on

reasonable terms,” but Gould noted in

1895 that the cottages already built were

needed for persons in the employ of the

corporation and were rented instead.

French industrialist and philanthropist

Jean Dollfus and Josiah Quincy of

Massachusetts had also developed

organizations to help workers buy homes

on easy terms. Quincy’s Homestead

Clubs were Boston’s earliest home-loan

savings societies. Dollfus founded the

Mulhouse Workingmen’s Dwellings

Company in France in 1853, which

included a building and loan association

and model houses designed by architect

Emile Muller. Dollfus sold these houses

rather than renting them. A proper

system of easy home-financing extended

to the industrial workforce remained

an exception well into the twentieth

century. In 1905, Gary, Indiana coupled

a home-financing plan with sensitive

town planning and was one of those


72.

73.

74.

exceptions. See Garner, Model Company

Town, 112, 149.

In September 1883, Olmsted designed

the grounds of the Hawthorn Street

estate of Edward D. Mandell, a director

for Wamsutta Mills. These plans are in

the Frederick Law Olmsted Historic

Site, Brookline, Mass., Job #672, and

correspondence documenting the project

is in Library of Congress, Manuscript

Division. In all, Olmsted’s firm pro-

posed or undertook six projects in New

Bedford. Only two are coeval with the

Howland Mill-the Mandell estate and a

May 1893 contract for specifications for

a driveway and walks for the Frederick

Grinnell estate on County Street

between Bedford and Orchard streets

(Job #1381). Charles Eliot produced a

landscape design for the extensive estate

of New Bedford attorney James D.

Stetson between 1883 and 1890.

A. J. Downing in his 1844 Trearise on the

Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening

wrote of New Bedford, “There is

scarcely a place in New England where

the pleasure grounds are so full of

variety.” In 1846 George Howland, Jr.,

John Howland, Abraham H. Howland,

and William D. Howland’s father

Matthew signed the Articles of Intention

for the New Bedford Horticultural

Society, now in the collections of the

New Bedford Free Public Library.

The proposal made to the New Bedford

Park Commission “by one of our most

prominent citizens” (likely William D.

Howland) was to use thirty acres of

marsh land as a dumping ground for

twenty years as a business investment for

75.

76.

the city and then convert it to a park. Its

estimated worth was twenty thousand

dollars, but it was never built. See

undated minutes, New Bedford Park

Commission, after June 1894, 3.

The concept of a system of pleasure

grounds and parkways to refresh urban

populations extended back to Olmsted

and Calvert Vaux’s works in New

York City’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s

Prospect Park beginning in 1853.

Olmsted’s most inclusive plans for

sylvan improvement of a metropolitan

region were realized in the Buffalo and

Boston park systems. In the Boston plan

of about 1881, the parkway system was

conceived of as a way of relieving a

health menace tied to water drainage in

the environs of Boston and of providing

a convenient and pleasant passageway

from the city to the suburbs. See Laura

Wood Roper, FLO: A Biography of

Frederick Law Ofmsted (Baltimore, Md.,

and London: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1993).

“Experiments with Mill Villages,” Feb. 4,

1922, Boston Globe Scrapbook.

On another city engineering map of the

same year, the park is called “Clark’s

Point Park.” On the transformation of

Clark’s Point, see Ellis L. Howland,

“Hazelwood, History of the City’s New

Park on Clark’s Point” and “How Joseph

Congdon’s Industry Carved Out Its

Beauty” Standard Times, July 27, 1901,

and June 21, 1902. Special thanks to

Joan Barney, Special Collections, New

Bedford Free Public Library, for

forwarding copies of these citations.

In 1840 banker and naturalist Joseph


77.

78.

79.

Congdon had built two stone buildings,

one a Gothic cottage and the other a

barn that show the influence of

Downing’s design principles, in the area

later proposed for the marine park.

Congdon transformed eighteen acres of

forested land into a park-like setting

with vantage points of the bay and

created an orchard and a greenhouse.

The Howland family purchased the

north part of the estate in 1865. Rachel

Howland summered in the converted

stone barn, and William D. and his

family lived in the other cottage after his

father passed away in 1884.

At the suggestion of Olmsted, Olmsted

and Eliot, the New Bedford Park

Commission was to ask the city to

purchase about 160 acres-the seventy

acres of the Poor House Farm, about

sixty acres of federal fort property at

Clark’s Point, and about twenty-eight

acres of private land-for park purposes

and to link a citywide park system.

Charles Eliot advised the city to secure

all beach rights around the marine park

as well.

This June 7, 1894, proposal by Olmsted,

Olmsted, and Eliot was also lost. A typed

facsimile with an illustration found its

way into a miscellaneous ftle in the

Building Permits Department at New

Bedford City Hall. John Truitt, my

teaching assistant, aided in locating it.

There is no record of this plan at either

the Olmsted National Historic Site or in

the Library of Congress.

Olmsted, Olmsted and Eliot to the New

Bedford Park Commission, June 13,

1894. The communication was submit-

80.

ted and approved by the Board of

Aldermen on December 13, 1894.

The parkway scheme was similar to the

one the firm had designed for Boston

but predated the plan Eliot and journal-

ist Sylvester Baxter developed for

Boston’s metropolitan area. The New

Bedford plan differed from the Olmsted

firm’s somewhat earlier plan for a

marine park in South Boston (begun in

1869 and listed in February 1891 as “City

of Boston, Plan of a Proposed Aquaria1

Garden”) in that it intentionally linked

the city’s parks to its burgeoning

industrial context. Planned in 1892, the

South Boston park connected the marine

park by a strandway to a residential area

of Dorchester. See the eighty-three

documents dating 1869-96 related to Job

#926, Marine Park, Boston, and Job

#931, Strandway, South Boston,

Olmsted National Historic Site. On the

Olmsted firm’s proposal for this marine

park, see undated minutes, New Bedford

Park Commission, submitted sometime

after June 1894, 1. I have since made

copies of these minutes and the Olmsted

correspondence regarding the New

Bedford system of parks and placed them

in the F. L. Olmsted Historic Site. They

will be included with Job No. 01810 for

the New Bedford Park Commission.

John Olmsted’s plan has not

previously been acknowledged. The lost

plan came to light on a research trip to

the New Bedford Free Public Library

with the help of Tina Furtado, assistant

librarian in special collections, and Todd

Williams, my research assistant. See

“The Late John C. Olmsted and the


City’s Park System,” Feb. 29, 1920,

Boston Globe Scrapbook, New Bedford

Free Public Library. In the proposal, the

city was to buy up the entire waterfront

area outside the Rodney French

Boulevard (at an estimated five to ten

thousand dollars) to preserve the view of

the Acushnet River and bay on both

sides; the remainder was to be filled in

with elite homes and picturesque open

spaces along the four-mile Point Road

diagonally across the cove from

Howland’s mill village-offering, in

effect, tandem naturalistic landscapes of

labor and leisure. Olmsted intended

Buttonwood Park to include ball fields,

tennis lawns, childrens’ playgrounds,

sand boxes, swings, a warming house for

ice skating, and even sheep barns.

Though no plans have yet come to light

for the marine park in New Bedford

other than its inclusion in a planned

system of parks, the idea continued to be

discussed in the local newspapers well

into the 1920s. By that time, however, a

marine park was proposed for land to the

northeast, abutting the Acushnet River

near the bridge from New Bedford to

Fairhaven, not for Clark’s Point.

81. Documentation of this project exists at

both the Library of Congress Manuscript

Division (correspondence beginning July

9, 1894) and at the Olmsted National

Historic Site (three plans from 1895,

job #01810). The New Bedford Park

Commission also paid an additional

five hundred dollars for an engineering

study of the water supply It is not clear

whether the third phase of the pro-

posal-tree planting over three years-

82.

83.

ever took place. This sketch is still

extant at the Park Commission. In 1894

New Bedford underwent a major

labor strike and felt the effects of the

national depression triggered by the

Panic of 1893, and it is possible that

Olmsted’s contributions ended with the

sketch and engineering study, both

completed in 1895.

Ruskin drew inspiration from the Bible

(a form of Christian Socialism) and the

social economic principles of Thomas

Carlyle and Robert Owen. For selected

discussions of Ruskin and Morris on the

issues of political economy and the

treatment of the “working producing

class,” see George I? Landow, Ruskin

(Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press,

1985), Chap. 3; William Morris, News

from Nowhere and Other Writings (London:

Penguin Books, 1993); Charles Harvey

and Jon Press, William Morris: Design and

Enterprise in Victorian Britain (Manchester,

Eng.: Manchester University Press,

1991), esp. introduction and Chap. 6;

and Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin,

Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in America

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press,

1986). For more on the specific nature

of changing management practices in

America, see David Montgomery, Beyond

Equality: Labor and the Radiral Republicans,

1862-l 872 (New York: Random House,

1967), and Daniel Nelson and Stuart

Campbell, “Taylorism versus Welfare

Work in American Industry: H.L. Gantt

and the Bancrofts,” Business History

Review 46 (Spring 1972): 1-16.

“Capital and Labor in Harmony

Howland Mills Held Up as Model by


84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

89.

the Cleveland Plain Dealer,” The Evening

Standard, Feb. 25, 1891. The New

Bedford newspaper reprinted the Plain

Dealer article in full.

Gould, Eighth Special Report, 327;

“Capital and Labor in Harmony.” New

Bedford City Documents 8, 1891, “Auditor’s

Report,” indicates that sixty dollars

of city funds, however, were expended

to support a baseball club for the

Howland Mills.

Pullman too offered these cultural

amenities, but he made it clear that

the town operated as a business and

charged fees for the use of the stables,

library, and even the church. Eventually,

however, the extreme example of

paternalism Pullman offered was

perceived by some as tantamount to

modern-day feudalism and stigmatized

company housing. See Ely, “Pullman: A

Social Study,” and Buder, Pullman.

The large percentage of workers from

Lancashire, England, had brought

English socialism and union activism

into the city prior to 1867. Outstanding

housing, wages, and benefits were ways

of tempering the urge to organize.

McMullen, “Lost Alternative,” 27.

“Howland Mills Involved,” The Morning

Mercury, Apr. 24, 1897, 1, noted, “Mr.

Howland has always been exceedingly

popular with the employees” and

added that he had organized and funded

an “annual excursion” for them to

Martha’s Vineyard.

New Bedford Evening Standard, Aug. 21,

1894; McMullen, “Lost Alternative,”

28-29.

For a discussion of wage reductions

90.

91.

92.

93.

94.

during the textile era in New Bedford,

see McMullen, “The Coming of the

Mills,” 5, 8, 9, 12, and McMullen,

“Industrialization and Social Change.”

American Wool and Cotton Reporter, Oct.

18, 1894, cited in McMullen, “Lost

Alternative,” 30.


Ibid., 325.

Cash and debts receivable for the New

Bedford Manufacturing Company were

listed as $36,399, the Howland Mills

$40,991, and the Retch Spinning

Corporation $219,917. For a full

disclosure of financial statements see

“Howland Mills Involved,” The Morning

Standard, Apr. 24, 1897, I.

The Bennett Manufacturing Company

built six mill buildings in 1889 alone. In

addition, the same people were founding

more than one company at about the

same time and thus were tying up

resources and collateral: Henry Halcomb,

who with Frank R. Hadley had founded

Bennett Manufacturing, just three years

later created the Columbia Spinning Mill.

In addition to the rapid expansion of

these two yarn mills, local newspapers on

April 15, 1897, revealed serious irregulari-

ties in the mills’ finances, including the

paying out of excessive dividends,

charging expenditures to improper

accounts, and falsifying indebtedness

reports to state officials. In all, hundreds

of thousands of dollars were embezzled,

leading to the suicide of the company

treasurer and the placing of the two mills

in receivership. See New Bedfoid Evening

Standard, April 15 and 16, June 22 and 24,

and July 9, 1897.


95.

96.

97.

98.

99.

Given the threat Howland’s management

policies on the ten-hour day and on

workers’ living conditions posed to the

majority of other mills in the city, some

foul play in connection with his

disappearance, or at least with the failure

of the bank (founded by his grandfather

and earlier run by his father) to extend

the loan, is not out of the question.

“Better than Feared . . . Mr. Howland

Believed to Have Wandered away while

Dazed,” The Evening Standard, Apr. 26,

1897, 1.

Evening Standard, May 6, 1897.

New Bedford Evening Standard, Feb. 17,

1898; McMullen, ‘Lost Alternative,”

36-37.

Because the New Bedford park plan was

unknown to scholars, Garner noted

that %o other company town or, for

that matter, small industrial town had

conceived such an extensive park

system.. . . The Hopedale commission

provided him the opportunity on a small

scale to do what Olmsted and Eliot did

in Boston with the Muddy River

development, which emerged as the

nation’s first regional park system in

1892.” In fact, the Hopedale commission

more likely provided Manning the

opportunity to carry out what Olmsted

and Eliot had envisioned for a New

Bedford park system at least as early as

1894. See Garner, Model Company Town,

192-94. The workers’ village Olmsted,

Olmsted and Eliot designed for the

Apollo Iron and Steel Company at

Vandergrift relied heavily on contour

planning as well, though its hierarchical

arrangement of mill agent and owner

housing and its use of a rail system

primarily to ship iron, steel, and lumber

made it more akin to the Oaks than to

Howland Mill Village. The Howland

village may also have influenced later

naturalistic planning schemes such

as Grosvenor Atterbury’s Forest Hills

Gardens (designed in 1919 by Frederick

Law Olmsted, Jr.) and Earle Draper’s

1925 plan of Chicopee, Georgia.

100. For a study of Hopedale see Garner,

Model Company Town, esp. 152-56.

101. See Garner, Model Company Town, 149,

fig. 32. At Hopedale, the actual laying of

the sewer line along Union Street was

not begun until 1889, but by 1897

almost all of the houses were connected

with “modern conveniences.”

102. For reports of the reorganization

committees see New Bedford Evening

Standard, May 25, 1897.

103. The New England Cotton Yarn Com-

pany also purchased the failed Bennett

Manufacturing Corporation and the

Columbia Spinning Mill-all spinning

mills-which indicates the growing

tendency toward corporate capitalism in

New England textiles. Similarly, the

British conglomerate Atlantic Thread

Company (ATCO) absorbed the

Wilhmantic Linen Company in 1898

along with other New England cotton

mills, including some in New Bedford.

With the consolidation move of ATCO

came increased resistance to efforts of

the American Federation of Labor to

organize its employees. See Beardsley,

Willimantic Industry and Community,

40-41, and Boss and Thomas, New

Bedford, 132.


104. “50 Years Ago,” Sunday Standard Times,

July 6, 1958, stated that in July 1908 the

New England Cotton Yarn Company

sold to Joseph T. Kenney more than

four thousand rods of land and that “a

considerable section of the area was later

to become the site of the Sharp Mill.”

The 1910 Walker City of New Bedford

map shows that at this time the Sharp

Mill was still called the New England

Cotton Yarn Company. Kenney was

indicated as owning more than five full

city residential blocks bounded by

Dartmouth, Sidney, Bolton, and Winsper

streets. The article stated that New

England Cotton Yarn retained possession

of the fifty Howland cottages when the

other part of the property was sold.

According to the New Bedford Record

of Building Permits, builder Joseph

Motta built six three-unit tenements in

the former Howland parcel in 1914-15

alone.

105. See “The Late John C. Olmsted and

the City’s Park System,” Boston Globe

Scrapbook.

106. The Soule Mill, designed in 1901 by

Boston firm Lockwood, Greene, and

Company and the first of the twentieth-

century New Bedford textile mills to be

incorporated, ended a five-year hiatus

during which no new textile mills were

incorporated in the city.

107. “Experiments with Mill Villages.”

108. The Howland Mill Village became a

Historic District on the National

Register of Historic Places in 1997.

109. As reflected by the Record of Building

Permits, the shift in New Bedford to the

conventional hipped-roof three decker

was underway by 1894. Its full expres-

sion, with bay windows and three

piazzas, was not standard until about

1907. Prior to this time, the flat-roof and

gable-ended “three tenements” were

prevalent. The high point of tenement

housing in New Bedford, not surpris-

ingly, was 1910, the same year that the

greatest number of mills were incorpo-

rated in the city. In 1910, 639 houses

were built containing 1812 tenements.

Of that number, 290 were three-deckers

that provided 870 tenements. During the

year of the second-largest building

activity, 1919,269 dwellings were built

containing only 396 tenements, and only

one of these 269 was a three-decker.

See “Building Statistics for the Year,”

Standard Times, Jan. 1, 1920. I owe

special thanks for the tireless help of

John Rosa III, Zoning Officer, in the

New Bedford City Deputy Building

Commissioner’s Office for allowing me

access, on repeated occasions, to the

Record of Building Permits from which

the documentary evidence of the three-

decker largely has been compiled.

For more on the New Bedford three-

decker see my forthcoming “Cultural

Weathering: Vernacular Architecture as

Cultural Production (The Portuguese-

American Transformation of the New

Bedford, Massachusetts Three-Decker

Flat),” Journal of Architectural Education

(Fall 1998).
